Perhaps the most fantastic thing to me about art is the sheer range of media. No person is drawn to a single medium for the exact same reason as any other. Some are drawn to more than one, and some have only a passing acquaintance with art at all.

Music is a popular medium in the world today. I think this is true in part because we live in a world more and more fast-paced every day. Music is the art that moves us from place to place, but it is also the art that just gets us through. Something fast and upbeat on the way to work, something slower and more deliberate after a long day to remind us that we're still thinking, feeling beings.

Cinema also ranks high in modern life. The last few generations have been raised to more and more escapist tendencies. We live for the weekends, because (by and large) we don't have to work. We watch movies, because they remind us of what life used to be or because they show us what life could be. Movies show us the lives we wish we were special enough or even just brave enough to live ourselves.

And what do these modern media replace? The fine arts-paintings, photographs, sculptures that sit sadly abandoned in their museum-mausoleums. It's not that people have forgotten how to sit and just absorb Monet's Water Lilies. It's not that Rothko's monumental abstractions of pure emotion have lost their power. Ansel Adams and Auguste Rodin are still names to be said with respect.

But the world and the way we live within it gain speed every day. We've trapped ourselves. We live fast and appreciate fast art. What we need to rediscover is that taking the time to look and really see the static beauty of a still image or a solid form is sometimes just what we need to stop that feeling of rushing headlong through a pointless life to an early grave.

Learn more about this author, Alyson Brown.
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