The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or number, exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
Interpretation
Art transcends the limitations of language, allowing for deeper understanding and expression beyond mere words.
Elliot W. Eisner's quote emphasizes that while language is a powerful tool for communication, it has inherent limitations that can restrict our thoughts and perceptions. Art, on the other hand, serves as a means to convey complex ideas and emotions that words alone cannot fully capture, thereby expanding our cognitive horizons and understanding of the world.
In practice
During a lecture on the role of art in society, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of artistic expression.
The important outcomes of schooling include not only the acquisition of new conceptual tools, refined sensibilities, a developed imagination, and new routines and techniques, but also new attitudes and dispositions. The disposition to continue to learn throughout life is perhaps one of the most important contributions that schools can make to an individual's development.
The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
The arts inform as well as stimulate; they challenge as well as satisfy. Their location is not limited to galleries, concert halls and theatres. Their home can be found wherever humans chose to have attentive and vita intercourse with life itself.
One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.
In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
Writing isn't something I do, writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me.
I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."
I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can't ever remember a time when I didn't.
The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.
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