State of the Arts

by Patricia Frischer

Two of the seven ways of learning are inter personal and inner personal*. This blog is my inner personal musing made public. I was pondering that the other day when I read a very interesting article in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik. He was the magazine’s art critic from 1987-1995 but has written fiction, humor, book reviews, profiles, and reported pieces from abroad. At the end of this last article, I found myself saying (internally), “Well done, Adam.”  I realized that I felt like I had had a conversation with this man and I almost felt I knew him and I certainly would like to consider him a friend. How is that possible with someone you have never met? 

I don’t often look at statistics because I am not sure I trust them off the web. Could it be robots that are looking at the site, or maybe people who are clicking on SDVAN thinking they will learn something about South Dakota?  And it seems like half of my readers are from Russia so what is up with that? But I have been writing this blog for 10 years now, with over 90 posts and 30,500 page views so that can’t all be me reading my own blog, can it? So are there occasional dialogues going on inter personally with someone out there that I know nothing about. I do hope that someone out there considers me a friend even though I have never met them.

As artists, we are constantly having that internal conversation with ourselves. I ask and answer questions about shape, color, content. Or I can bliss out with into subconscious nirvana when I feel that someone else is guiding my hand and producing the work. But lately, people have become my medium as I get excited about putting together collaborations  that I hope enhance our community.  

Over the last 20 years, I have seen the visual arts community become stronger and stronger and now the performing arts which seemed to be lagging the last few years is catching up as well. How do we measure this? We do so with the strength of the umbrella organizations that serve entire sections of the arts. I am forecasting that the culmination of those collaborations will be the return of the San Diego County Arts Council. This won’t be because of the administration of that organization, but because individual organizations come together and see the worth of uniting.

*The others are kinesthetic, audio, verbal, mathematical and of course, visual.