Thomas Carlyle, wrote that it is through symbols that people consciously and unconsciously live, work and create meaning – the arts transform experience.

The Arts mediate between inner perceptions and feelings and the external world. Your interpretation of university life?

Every experience of making meaning in the Arts requires personal interpretation and meaning is directly embodied and embedded in the Art form.

The Arts distil a range of meanings within a form but the form also resonates with, and is evocative of, many different personal meanings and human experiences.

Form in the arts appeals directly to the senses. In what ways?

The imprecision of the Arts means a piece of Art can accommodate a variety of interpretations. The most historical of Art forms can be interpreted in contemporary ways.

Every piece of Art has a ‘fan of referents’. (Reid 1975) This is best understood as a shared context of meaning. Art experiences we share we common and personal experiences?

Gadamer (1986) suggests that the Arts are a form of festival and celebration. How so?

The Arts break down barriers by fusing the real with imaginative – what we are with what we might become.

The Arts challenge the accepted because they speculate on experience and require an imaginative response from students.

The creative response of making meaning in any of the arts is a personal response. In this way, the Arts are reflexive: they recall and crystallise our perceptions of our lives and ourselves.

HOWEVER

The Arts are always polemics: they argue for a particular view of reality and experience. A particular artwork is only useful for as long as it represents the vision of the creator or that of a potential audience.

(Reference: McLeod John, 1991, The Arts and the Year 2000, Curriculum Corporation, Department of Education: Queensland)