The effect of art

“There’s a phrase I’ve often heard from audience members at popular musicals (but, oddly, never anywhere else): the show, they’ll say, “really took me out of myself”.  They are saying something basic and profound about the ecstasy of art, the act of being taken out of one’s normal state to a different level of being.  It may be an emotional or intellectual rapture, it may please or provoke, and it surely effects an alteration, even if only for a few hours.  That is the great and enduring power and joy of art: it continually expands the boundaries of one’s knowledge and the limits of what one may become.”

– Deborah Jones, “Grand Gestures”, The Australian, 1 October, 2011.

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