The following post is another old draft (written around 10 months ago). One part is about the sky, and the other is about art and censorship:
Context is a wonderful thing. I’m not just talking about context within the confines of art or conversations, but across everything. There is a very real and inherent pointlessness in everything if you take it out of context. I choose to not look at that as something depressing, but rather as an opportunity to forget all the stress that burdens the mind sometimes. It’s a chance to laugh at the futility of our efforts to fight against entropy. I don’t really believe that everything is pointless, though. That’s the power of context right there: the power that we have as humans is to put things into different perspectives, for better or for worse. Regardless of context, I think what I can safely say is that when I was here, I saw the sky, and it was beautiful.
I was talking with my sister the other day, and she was telling me about a presentation she’s working on for her class about the responsibility of authority to censor art, and it got me thinking. Let’s break it down: what gives an authority authority? Either it is given by the people who chose it, or it is taken by the people in power. Let’s assume that we’re in an ideal world and that the first case is the one that’s happening. What is the difference between the man in power and any other man on the street? It’s the responsibilities that he has to carry out. So we can say, for now, that an authority has power because of the responsibilities it was elected to fulfill. If it fails to fulfill them, then it is not an authority anymore. Now, moving on the second part of the question: does censorship diminish the value of art? I noticed an interesting discrepancy here when I was discussing this part with my sister: she was thinking of art as a whole (i.e. as a concept), and I was thinking of art as in a specific piece of art (a film, song, etc.). We both agreed that censorship diminishes the value of art. My sister’s conclusion for her presentation in the end was that an authority’s responsibility to seek the greater good of its people, which includes censorship, and so an authority should censor while keeping in mind the fact that it should maintain a balance between the value of art and the greater good of society.