Blog #8

The following quote is a short excerpt from this Ted Talk where the two artists discuss how they made a difference: “A visual statement was the thing that came to my mind immediately.  Like, would we just make something that looks so nice so that if people look at the place and they already know that are going to dislike it, all of a sudden, they’re confronted with something beautiful? And that would kind of change their mind.” Art has the strange gift of manipulating perceptions.  So when these artists painted gigantic murals on the houses of these neighborhoods the people that lived there were figuratively slapped in the face. Suddenly their homes did not look decrepit anymore. They were beautiful works of art. So how does this act of displaying one’s work help others? I think that the art has two direct impacts. It improves the aesthetics of the area and the mindset of the people who live there.

-I revised this quote making it more relevant to the passage. I knew I wanted it in my paper because of its very natural sound. It really does a great job of introducing the way that the artists sound as actual people. Because I moved this quote into the middle of the paragraph it avoids the “hit and run” method of a quote. It has more of a flow with my writing.

In his writing he references an old philosophy text written by Peter Singer called “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”  The basic idea behind this is a thought experiment. If you saw a small child drowning in a pool of water: would you jump in to rescue her, even if you hadn’t pushed her in? But if you jump in you would ruin your clothes. According to Southan “It would be highly controversial to say “no”- and yet most of us manage to ignore those dying of poverty and preventable disease all over the world, though we easily could save them.” I agree with his writing very much. We all should do our best to help each other out. However, when Southan continues in his writing he makes art sounds like it doesn’t help at all. Like it is a waste of all of our time. I don’t think that he accounts for all of the different ways that you can make a difference in the lives of others.

– In this paragraph I used one of the they say I say introductons to have a nice transition from my writing to the quote. This way my quote fits nicely in the quotation sandwich where it is surrounded by my ideas but it also isn’t choppy transitioning between someone else ideas.