Today I attended a Philanthropy Club meeting at LUMA, the Loyola University Museum of Art, on the 3rd floor next to the Martin D'Arcy collection of antiquities. Meaningless as it may be to you, I actually helped write labels for each work of art on display (at the time) for this collection back in 2008 before I graduated college (Loyola) that spring. I have to point this out because, truthfully, I haven't visited the collection since 2008, and in actuality closed the door to Art History since I finished my MA in the subject back in 2010. So, 6 years later, here I am again.
Recently, I find myself quite often repeating this line to people I meet for the first time: I abandoned art history five years ago, but here we are and here I am, and well...it found me again. I actually don't know what that really means other than simply this: I grew very tried of studying the study of art, so I threw myself at something I thought was completely different: civic engagement and social justice. And yet, today, I advocate for art as, they like to say, a 'catalyst for social impact'. I'm still working out exactly what that means to me personally: I am a trained Art Historian, so my primal nature is to contextualize art objects, explain their significance to the historical trajectory of the practice, and then humanize the value of the object as well as the cult of the object's artist/maker. But in the last two years, I have moved away from THE OBJECT and THE ARTIST, and find myself contextualizing, explaining, and defending THE PRACTICE - - making, creating, documenting, practicing art.
At the Philanthropy Club meeting today, where the main topic of conversation was fundraising for the arts in Chicago (i.e examples and best practices), each of the guest panelists + moderator was asked this last question: why is Art necessary to survival? I'm sure, if I had to re-write my MA Thesis again, 90 pages would only scratch the surface in answering why art is necessary for civilization's humanity and survival, but what I know now is that, very clearly, ART is necessary for mine.