The arts are among the ways human beings make meaning, imagine possibilities, give form to experience and communicate across the boundaries of language, culture and time. Whole Life Times explores art not as an optional decoration to life, but as part of how individuals and societies understand themselves, express values, heal, celebrate, question, remember and create new ways of seeing.
Art can change how we perceive a place, a person, an idea or even ourselves. It can make the familiar strange enough to notice again, and sometimes make what feels distant suddenly intimate.
Explore recent articlesPainting, photography, sculpture, illustration and other visual forms that invite us to notice the world differently.
Music as performance, culture, memory, creativity and a language capable of reaching beyond words.
Dance and performance as forms of communication, ritual, creativity, embodiment and shared experience.
Film, theatre and narrative as ways of exploring identity, culture, values, conflict and possible futures.
Not all knowledge arrives as data, analysis or argument. A painting, song, poem, dance or film can reveal something about human experience that cannot easily be translated into propositions. The developing Whole Life Universal Field of Knowledge should therefore make room not only for information about the arts, but for artistic works themselves as meaningful ways of knowing and experiencing.
That means an artwork can sit in relationship with an article, a scientific idea, a cultural movement, a place, a person or a historical moment — without being reduced to commentary about something else.
Social and ecological transformation depend partly upon our ability to imagine forms of life that do not yet exist. Artists, storytellers, musicians, performers and filmmakers often help societies sense those possibilities before they can be expressed as plans or policies.
Current and recent Arts material will ultimately be supplied through the WLT Article Index.
Recent magazine material on art, music, dance, film, theatre and creativity will appear here as issues are indexed.
Earlier WLT material on artists, musicians, writers, performers, film, cultural life and creativity will progressively become discoverable as the historical collection is indexed.
Conversations with artists about how ideas become works, where creative practice comes from and what art can make visible.
Exploring the embodied and communal dimensions of artistic expression through sound, movement and performance.
How stories, images, performances and creative movements help societies question assumptions, remember experience and imagine alternatives.