Art tends to be created from the truth of an artist but interpreted with the truths of the receiver, which consists of their personal knowledge and experiences.
Simply this means that art is created with a certain intention, but it is not ever certain that it will be interpreted in the intended way. For example, and this is a crazy story, the interstellar soundtrack was interpreted so differently by me and my dad. Whenever I listen to the soundtrack, I find it to be very liberating as it literally feels like I am being transported to another dimension, I am very interested in astrophysics, and so in some ways, this just helped me believe and connect with something bigger. But my dad interpreted the soundtrack in a completely different way. Befreo he even watched the movie, I played one of the scores for him and asked him what it made him feel, he took a moment and replied, “It makes me feel like I am spending time with you and Avni (my sister) on a rainy day”. So already you can see it moved us differently, but, now here comes the actually crazy part, when Hans Zimmer wrote the track, all Christopher Nolan told him was “[write a score about what it feels like to be a father]” and Nolan gave him no insight into the genre of the movie even!!! And so weirdly Hans Zimmers intention matched my dad’s personal knowledge and became a point of connection in a way. (This moment actually freaked me out so much, in a good way)
The arts seek to encourage self-reflection and heighten awareness, by exploring ethics, values, and life through a uniquely creative experience.
For me, an example would be, The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Now the story is rooted in partial facts about what happened during the Spanish conquest of Peru, but somehow reading the play, and working on creating a performance had a more profound impact on me than plainly researching the topic would have had on me. The play creates a friendship between Pizarro and Atahualpa, which might not have been true, and emotionally engages you in the friendship, so when Pizarro betrays Atahualpa, it hits you harder than ever. Making you question the point of the war, conquest, and the ethics of ambition. By emotionally involving you in the story, the play creates a very immediate experience that forces you to relive what the Spaniards and Incas might have gone through them and creates an avenue to empathise with the story, making you connect to something that might be irrelevant to your personal context.
Art has authority over emotion and has the ability to connect people which sometimes drives a change in society.
As I established before, art has greater power over humans than facts do, for the most part, and this means that as a result it becomes the topic of discussion, or a point to connect on, and in some cases such connections can have enough influence to change someones behaviour (but that depends on their emotional avalability). For example, the Guernica spurred a change in society, and got people talking about the atrocities and immorality of war. It was a revolt against war and its atrocities. Making people think, and take action against it. It also made some people angry, but either way, it started a conversation, which was in itself a form of action.
