Toys, Robert Fuentes larger version

A Cup of Tea with Choreographer Sean Dorsey | Jenna Humphrey

I read a book called What Is Art? for one of my undergraduate classes, long before that question had acquired, for me, the telling stink of a cliché. I was young and in a haze; blinking in corridors and trespassing under train trestles to photograph graffiti I could rarely interpret, though I liked to wonder what the heavyweights would think. (Tolstoy would approve; Kant would call this bullshit.) I left the course more confused than when I’d started, for the very reason that What Is Art? is an impossible question. Even bad art must begin by qualifying as art, so it obviously isn’t an issue of quality.

The act of defining has become more elastic in the wake of postmodernism, losing much of its authority, but that doesn’t change the intrinsic human urge to make sense of the world. Writers must continue to write, poets to muse, thinkers to postulate. Those who have invested in art often find themselves drawn back to that question of what it is or how it should function. Oscar Wilde claims that “All art is quite useless,” and Benjamin Constant first coined the idiom, l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake). Yet we’ve come far since Aestheticism and social advocates today don’t think art has to stay free of an agenda to remain “pure.” Purity be damned, the marriage of creative and social efforts can build community while lending cohesion to what choreographer Sean Dorsey calls a world full of “suffering and violence and disorganization and chaos.”

Sean Dorsey, founder and Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions, settles down with Tea Party Features Editor, Kim Vo, and me into Editor-in-Chief Esther Lee’s elegant, bohemian apartment. Kim places a smoking white pitcher of Mighty Leaf tea and little cookies in front of us. We are having—you know—a tea party. » next page »

 

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5