Philosopher Ben-Ami Scharfstein on art and community:
"As well as creating, we need to contemplate art in order to make our lives fuller and more focused. In its contemplation, we learn to demarcate ourselves more clearly and, at the same time, become both more individual and more social. This happens because the arts are like speech, itself an art, in that they help to join persons who regard one another as individuals into a kind of commnunity. Individuals who seriously contemplate the same art weaken the barriers of strangeness that might otherwise separate them from one another. The contemplation of art helps us respond to its impersonally personal messages by sensing the bond between its other real and possible viewers. Those who contemplate the same art at least begin to enter into the same aesthetic community and, beyond the community, a whole similar aesthetic world."
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