Quote:
the trouble with traditional arts is that there is no room to expand
If you are trying to keep an art traditional, you will not add techniques that would make it better, for worry that it will 'water it down'
Therefore it becomes too stale.
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No, I agree. Traditional arts seem to have little practical purpose. That doesn't, however, mean they have no
value. The relics I see in museums are generally inferior in performance to modern-day developments, but that doesn't mean I'm ready to throw away everything in the Smithsonian or the Louvre. Preservation, I think, has its place.
I look at it almost like I look at the Boy Scouts. Bear with me, it'll make sense in a minute.
The Boy Scouts, no matter how much it adapts to modern times, still seeks to preserve a set of traditional ideals. Those ideals are the core of being a Boy Scout, and if you handed them to an average teenager today, they might think the list looked a little McGoo. It's easy to look at those things and see Wally and Beaver Cleaver, but the fact is, I think those values are what make a society strong. Get caught up in the rush to innovate, and you lose old principles like that to whatever the current fad might be.
In that sense, I think it takes a balance. In order to be able to fight well, there's no way
I'm going to rely on traditional arts. To me, it's the equivalent of using a flintlock rifle in modern war. You're not going to catch me rejecting tanks and bombs and machine guns in modern warfare, and you're not going to convince me that modern methods aren't superior for plain out-and-out fighting. But I can see the value in traditional arts when it comes to other things. I might really enjoy shooting a flintlock rifle (I really do) when my life's not on the line. I might feel a sense of connection with my ancestors if I go hunting with one. That cultural identity might be important to me for a lot of reasons. Likewise, there might be something in a traditional art that really calls to me. Identifying with that in the same context that people did hundreds of years ago might be a great thing for me in terms of values, philosophy, or whatever.
In a nutshell, I think it's important to have both around - so long as you understand for yourself what purpose they serve. I mean, the Yankee Clipper was a fine aircraft in its day, but if I want to fly across the Atlantic now, just go ahead and give me a modern plane. Doesn't mean, though, that I'd turn down a fun ride in an old Boeing 314!