ART CAN CHANGE THINGS

A scene from Academy Award winning South Korean movie "Parasite"

“Parasite” won the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year, 2019.  It also won Best Director for South Korean film maker Bong Joon-Ho, and Best Screenplay, and Best Foreign Film.  

The movie is astonishing! First, the color saturation! Color is so intense that immediately you “get” that this is a fable. The setting is modern urban South Korea. When have you ever seen that on the big screen? For today’s wealthy Westerners, the movie focuses its lens on the squalid living circumstances of a poor city family (but the younger adults are all computer savvy — one of the many dichotomies of this place and era). But wait! Don’t feel sorry for this clan. They “work the system” — parasites. And they latch onto a rich family who live in bucolic modernity behind high walls just a few blocks away, insulated from the squalor— parasites in their own way.

Today, a news story reports that the South Korean government has passed a resolution to grant 3.2 million won (about $3000 in U.S.) to every urban household living in subterranean and semi-basement apartments. The grant is to improve heating systems, ventilation and replace floors, windows, and fire alarms.

The movie is directly responsible for that standard of living upgrade. The power of art. Is it the best way to form public policy? No, probably not, but wide spread public scrutiny cuts through a lot of red tape.

Art can zoom in on hard topics and sometimes, radically change public attitudes. Here’s a partial list of examples.

WEST SIDE STORY opened on Broadway in 1957, and was the first major musical to deal with the serious issues of gang violence, immigration, discrimination and police inadequacy to address changing mores. (It also happened to have a brilliant score and lyric…Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim!)

Part of the Keith Harding mural for "The Normal Heart"

THE NORMAL HEART, Larry Kramer’s play, opened in 1985. The set included posters and art by then-unknown pop artist Keith Harding. The topic was HIV-AIDS. This was at the beginning of the epidemic — the Reagan Administration was not responding to this health emergency.  The play and Harding’s popular posters and murals broke through the barriers between high and low art and poked a hole in the silence of these deaths.

Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” was recorded in 1939. The lyrics are about black lynching in America. The song became a global hit and helped launch the U.S. Civil Rights movement.

Pablo Picasso's "Guernica"

Pablo Picasso’s dramatic black and white mural “Guernica” was painted in 1937 to memorialize the 1930’s Spanish War. The painting illustrates the brutality and absurdity of war. It traveled throughout the world as part of the World’s Fair, crossing culture and linguistic barriers to carry the message globally.

Each of these examples relied heavily on a world stage from which to cast its message.  We sang a song in Sunday School when I was a child “this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. Hide it under a bushel, NO…” 

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