Our philosophy of the arts: Stage | Gallery | Cultural Essays | Current Exhibit
Art plays a significant role in our culture. Our approach at the Artisan is: "To explore the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in art and ideas".
Exploring: Taking a proactive stance to provide a forum for creative expressions that have potential to say something constructive in the Artisan's public space. This pursuit is driven by the value of the "good" as found in the best wisdom and religious traditions of the world.
The Good, the True, the Beautiful: For centuries philosophers and cultural thinkers have been concerned to ponder the Good, the True, the Beautiful in artistic expression. This collection of terms in some way summarizes the core longings of the soul. The 'good' or 'common good' is the idea that there are good things to pursue, cultivate, and explore for the purpose of flourishing for humans and their environs in a public and wide-spread way. In the study of ethics, the
central idea is the 'good' - that which is beneficial, contributes to well-being, community health, human flourishing, etc. The notion of the 'good' for the Artisan means that we do not offer things merely for entertainment, but also for their potential, in unique ways, to cultivate goodness. But you cannot think about ultimate goodness without being also concerned with what is 'true'. The pursuit of truth is the goal to identify what is real, and to think about how it contributes to the common good. And the True and the Good is often captured in artistic expression, in what is 'beautiful'. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful has always been articulated in mostly transcendent ideas.
Arts and Ideas: Expressions of human creativity and thought that emerge in various media (music, poetry, lectures, book releases, cultural dialogue, visual arts, drama, spoken and printed word, etc.). Simply speaking, the arts and the ideas that accompany them are fitting conduits for exploring the Good, the True, and the Beautiful for the community.
