How does one recognize one’s own biases?
Look, society has you in a headlock, and that’s not always a bad thing. I know that I happen to live in a pretty great time and place. We have political quarrels, sure. And there is a shitload too much inequity in the world, but personally I’m wrapped up in so many layers of protective society that it is easy to take it for granted.
But taking something for granted can have both positive and negative vibes.
Bias comes in all forms, and this has never really been a political or a social studies project so my preference to examine it a little closer hones in on the art of it all.
And maybe that’s the best place to start anyways: beginning with something low stakes, like how we think about art or music or photography, is a helluva lot easier on the soul than reevaluating our social, economic, and political biases, huh?
This also isn’t an instruction manual. I’m not going to itemize how to squint your eyes at just the right angle to see a new perspective or pinch your brain down a route that let’s you outthink preconceptions. I’m merely going to suggest that bias is both insidious and abundant in most of our lives. You can probably start recognizing it if you care to look for it, and starting with low friction notions about, say, that hobby you love so much can probably make you better at recognizing and accepting bigger biases.
Society is a wonderful thing we built, but we’re still humans who have the power to ask questions about why we do things the way we do—and if art was meant to expand the mind of the audience, whose to say it can’t expand the mind of the artist, too?
Terms FROm this POSt
- audience
- Creativity is often a dance between creator and audience. Art can exist in a vacuum, of course, but the perception of art by a receptive human mind seems to me to a critical half of the creative equation.
- bias
- It’s hard work thinking differently than others, and I often think of bias as a mental shortcut we all take so that we don’t need to. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s outright dangerous. But it recognizing it makes us more human, I think. That’s my bias.
- vibe
- There are many words that try to encapsulate the ineffable feeling or aura of a thing or an idea. Vibe is yet another comfortable and trendy stab at trying to pin down a definition for something that is hard to define about those very things. It often implies an alignment, positive or negative, with the feeling given off by the subject of the vibe.
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