What I was most interested in was how you could bring the sense of a place to someone who had no prior connection to it, who had never been there, and so on. You go to an amazing place, want to tell everyone what it was like, and "you just had to be there" is an unsatisfying answer :P Obviously art's going to affect you more if you have a personal connection, but I think good art can have an impact without that!
I don't doubt photography can touch people in this way—and in general I think I am less affected by visual art than e.g. my artsy friends; with some exceptions my average trip through an art museum is mostly "hey lots of pretty pictures" while I could often tell that my art-museum-companions were experiencing something more profound.
But for me personally, when I think of forms that for me convey "immediate and urgent sense of wonder"-type feelings—music's probably tops up there, honestly, which is why I listened to this piece when I got home, as it was the closest thing I could think of. Poetry can, I think.
And I do think certain mediums are naturally better-equipped for some types of communications than others. For instance, the novel's uniquely well-suited for giving you a fuller sense of a person's life over a long time span, even someone very unlike yourself, because it's a sustained narrative over a ton of pages and you're forced to spend a lot of time in that person's head. The novel is not well-suited for that "immediate and urgent sense of wonder" thing, and in general feelings that would not arise naturally from the narrative itself will be tricky to convey.
ETA: I wonder if this explains some of what fascinated me about JRPGs as a genre in my youth? They seem to nicely combine "sustained narrative", which I love, with immediate visual flashiness-type things, and I think I've always been a little disappointed that the latter is hard to do in novels. I would love to someday write a book that has the feel of, say, Chrono Cross, but a huge part of Chrono Cross's feel seems inextricably rooted in its visual language, stuff that's harder to do in pure prose.
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Date: 2017-02-21 06:06 am (UTC)I don't doubt photography can touch people in this way—and in general I think I am less affected by visual art than e.g. my artsy friends; with some exceptions my average trip through an art museum is mostly "hey lots of pretty pictures" while I could often tell that my art-museum-companions were experiencing something more profound.
But for me personally, when I think of forms that for me convey "immediate and urgent sense of wonder"-type feelings—music's probably tops up there, honestly, which is why I listened to this piece when I got home, as it was the closest thing I could think of. Poetry can, I think.
And I do think certain mediums are naturally better-equipped for some types of communications than others. For instance, the novel's uniquely well-suited for giving you a fuller sense of a person's life over a long time span, even someone very unlike yourself, because it's a sustained narrative over a ton of pages and you're forced to spend a lot of time in that person's head. The novel is not well-suited for that "immediate and urgent sense of wonder" thing, and in general feelings that would not arise naturally from the narrative itself will be tricky to convey.
ETA: I wonder if this explains some of what fascinated me about JRPGs as a genre in my youth? They seem to nicely combine "sustained narrative", which I love, with immediate visual flashiness-type things, and I think I've always been a little disappointed that the latter is hard to do in novels. I would love to someday write a book that has the feel of, say, Chrono Cross, but a huge part of Chrono Cross's feel seems inextricably rooted in its visual language, stuff that's harder to do in pure prose.