“Time and again, the tools of change, and of progress, of revolution, of ferment — they’re not just pickaxes and hammers and screens and software, but they’ve also been brushes and pens and cameras and guitars.” - Obama in 2011 honoring Arts & Humanities Awards
Praxis of the Arts had its first meeting this past Wednesday, with the dual aims of putting together a multidisciplinary conference exploring creativity, social justice, and the law, as well as forming a community of thinkers, artists, and scholars interested in the same. The blueprint was last years Harvard 2 Harvard Arts Symposium, with the hope of improving upon last year’s (awesome) conference and creating something even better.
Some questions we’re thinking about:
What are some of the most engaging themes at the juncture of art, social policy, and law?
How can we explore these issues visually or practically, so that participants come away having learns something, and feeling like they’ve made a real contribution?
How to structure the community meetings / hang out sessions so that we get a lot done, but also have fun and explore engaging issues?
Meetings will probably be twice a month and anyone that’s interested is welcome to attend. This past time we discussed muralism, organization, copyright, counter-culture influence and street art.
So, the word of the week this week is Praxis: ”Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practiced, embodied, or realised. “Praxis” may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas. … In Ancient Greek the word praxis (πρᾶξις) referred to activity engaged in by free men. Aristotle held that there were three basic activities of man: theoria, poiesis and praxis. There corresponded to these kinds of activity three types of knowledge: theoretical, to which the end goal was truth; poietical, to which the end goal was production; and practical, to which the end goal was action. Aristotle further divided practical knowledge into ethics, economics and politics. He also distinguished between eupraxia (good praxis) and dyspraxia (bad praxis, misfortune).”[1]
- From Wikipedia↵
