Art

Art surrounds us. I think pretty much all of us can agree with this statement, it almost always is with us and in one form or another is difficult to escape. Between advertisements, movies, poetry, and music, art is an integral part of our lives. However there is one form of art that receives very little attention; one that is neglected in part because it is intrinsic, but highly moving regardless. This form of art is reading.

It may be easy to say that reading is not a form of art. It surely doesn’t fit into our model of what art is, it isn’t visual, or aesthetic. You can’t hear reading, it just doesn’t fit in. However I’d like to look at what art is. In a general perspective, art is the focusing of creative energies towards a sensual experience. When you consider music or advertisements, it is easy to see that these subjects fall into the category of art. Reading also meets this criterion, though once again we neglect it because it is intrinsic. Just as the painter sees or the musician hears, as a reader advances they can experience the story instead of just understanding it. This encourages thought much more than the text on the page, and allows for much the same enjoyment as other forms of art. Because of our failure to view reading as an art, we do a lot to screw up its instruction. We teach our children to interpret words on a page, and while many of us learn to explore further with our minds as we age, I would argue that the reason so many people dislike reading is because they do not understand how to do it. I believe that we need to instruct students in an abstract manner, just as you teach any other form of art. You can tell a painter line by line how to draw or a singer note by note how to sing, but it loses its beauty when it is done this way, and I am afraid we are doing this with reading.