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.
Meeting authors is kind of the death of the characters. That is always heartbreaking.
Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.
From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the '70s, the general attitude - not just me, but also my colleagues - was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.
It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.
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