Statement

There’s a scene in the movie White Men Can’t Jump when Wesley Snipe’s character claims that Woody Harelson’s may be able to “listen” to Jimi Hendrix, but he cannot “hear” him.  The implication, that the appreciation of cultural creations are reserved as the sole domain of the specific culture that created them, is a flawed, greedy notion.  Distinctions between cultures that would partition the creative achievements of humanity into limited, bordered entities are not drawn by nature but defined by mankind.  Our instinct to create art, or that which we recognize as art irrespective of the creators’ familiarity with such concepts, unites artists across place and time.  By tracing links between our lives and the great treasure of our collective cultural inheritance, we will see that everybody has the potential to hear Hendrix if we’re willing to listen.

 

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