THE POWER OF ART IN OUR UGLY WORLD
By: OKEY ANUEYIAGU
May I welcome you to our 1st Quarter Newsletter for 2024. Our last Newsletter of 2023, had a range of very exciting features that elicited many positive responses from our members, our readers, and from members of the art world. We thank all of you for the many accolades we received, as we are encouraged to do better.
Our country over many decades, has experienced tumultuous ethnic, religious and political upheavals resulting in the destruction of properties, distortions of peoples livelihoods, and the deaths of innocent citizens. The disastrous impacts of these upheavals, have become extremely incalculable and consequential. The perpetuation of these harmful cycles of the orgies of animalistic behaviours in us, and around the world, is confounding and equally baffling, as they continue to haunt us and devastate the world, as we know it today.
The proposition that has raised my curiosity, in the many decades that I have actively participated in the art and all its forms; collecting art, music, architecture and design, writing, reading, plays and movies, etc, is the power that art has had in the midst of these turmoils ravaging the world. I sometimes feel that the role of the art is essentially to beautify and flourish our world, and not to be enmeshed in its politics and wahala. The predictable response to this, is that I may be wrong. That despite our strong primeval passions towards art, and our thinking about it in isolation to all the other aspects of our lives, we must realise its importance, its role and place in our body politic, and our other inclinations.
Generally, I believe that most artists do not have pre-conceived ideas, neither do they set out to influence or improve other people. What I think they do, is simply to create perfect expectations of their talents and their experiences, to the point where their art has the essential potential to humanize the beholder. But are we humanized enough to use the art and it’s beauty to be kind to the world and its inhabitants?
The Society for Art Collection in carrying out our activities, recognizes that art and its beauty impels us to pay some attention to the proper order of things around us and the world. I believe that art startles us, and prompts us to discard of all of our prejudices and hate, while embracing the positive things that will make our world a more pleasant and beautiful place to dwell. We must admit that art, and its absolute absorption, trains us to see and accept the world patiently in a just, amiable, righteous and equitable ways. We in The Society accept the virtue of art as the veil that uncovers our self consciousness and our love of one another.
The Power of Art can be seen in how it widens our emotional repertoire by presenting us with the open floodgates of infinite human joy, happiness and creativity, giving us insights on how to feel and how to express ourselves either in sympathy or in grief.
I have carefully chosen this title in my Welcome Address, because I believe that the art, as I have known it, is deep and immensely immersed in everything that we do, and that there is a direct correlation between the beauty of the art and the quality of the lives we live in and outside our personal domains. It is crucial to impact on us, that art teaches us to see the world through one anothers eyes, and invariably, understand the behaviours and nuances of others in appreciation of the strength in our diversities, cultures, ideas and nomenclatures. The art is clearly powerful in understanding our comparative humanity, in the midst of our turmoil.
As we continue to harbor our political, religious, and ethnic addictions and the fears and terrors that come with them, I am confident that the undogmatic free-spirit and liberties that follow our art, will one day liberate the world and flourish it with the beauty and peace that the art provides.
I welcome you to sit back and enjoy the beautiful contents of our current Newsletter, as I invite those that are not members yet, to join us.
Thank you.
Dr. Okey Anueyiagu
President / Society for Art Collection.