Art for People

Preserving, educating/learning, and spreading are 3 totally different things.

Every performance has its basic social and economic background. If the base change, the performance will change or disappear. For example, local Chinese Opera is still lively in many provinces in China, but it's much more artificial in Taiwan. Maybe 胡撇仔戏 performing in front of the temples is much close to this kind of situation. If we want to presearve some kinds of art works, it's because the art value of art works is so precious, but it's impossible to presearve the social and economic background. So that's why we also say: "Keep them in the museum as fossils."

However, creating new proletarian art style is different. It means you have to both serve and educate proletarian people. It's not only the learning process of artists themselves but also of the audiences. Besides, "Art for Art's sake" is totally unsuitable in this kind of situation. This makes me think of "Fine Art" reflectively because these 2 ideas (for people's sake and for art's sake) are incoherent.

While talking about spreading, we can see some performance groups such as Cloud Gate or Paper Windmill, they really tried to do a lot of REAL performances for people and hardly gained anything benifits comparing with 赖声川. We might judge the effects and discuss how to make things better, but the content of these performances don't have to have any prolatarian ideologies if they do this sincerely.

If we just think from personal perspects, of course we don't have to consern these question. If we care, it's because we are social animals and want to create some public value bigger than our ownselves.