Practicing Imagination

I enjoy modern art…but I’m not an expert….I just like to see it…to hear it… to experience it. I’m not sure why…I think I’m on a journey to figure that out. There is sometimes a child-like quality about it that I like. Not that it is childish, but often the artist let’s his/her inner child out to play. The modern artist often gets away with doing things that that normally would be considered crazy, audacious, unusual, way too wild in the daily work-a-day world.

I like the way modern art stretches my imagination….even though I don’t know what it is about or why….I really don’t need to know….I just allow it to exercise my imaginative muscles…and that is a good thing….something about imagining the kind of world I want to live in….maybe a kind of imaginative therapy session that helps me imagine somthing much bigger.I read a quote this week that supports this need for practicing imagination. “The key pathology of our time,” Walter Brueggemann writes, “which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination so that we are too numbed, satiated and co-opted to do serious imaginative work.”

Has your imagination been numbed? co-opted? atrophied? ?  Go to a modern art museum and give it a work out…..I think we all have some “serious imaginative work” ahead of us.

BTW, you may find me at a modern art museum this next week having a little work out.