Rhys Southan’s text “Is Art a Waste of Time” focuses on his interest and love for art and its importance for the world. Whereas, he also wrote about the Effective Altruism Movement (EA) who he worked with alongside, as they were people who focused on wanting to, “reduce suffering and increase lifespan and happiness.” They believe that art isn’t necessarily helping and is infact a waste of time. According to the EA, one’s action and helpfulness depends on the quality of their thinking and time. One must efficiently help the world and go above and beyond, rather than just doing the minimum. Another important claim the EA has is that small contributions are somewhat pointless as they do nothing to really help the world. As to why they continue to believe bigger actions are crucial.  The EA has a lot of strong opinions and one is that every person in this world could be and should be, “doing more than they currently are.” Nothing is ever enough. As Rhys writes he makes it seem that artists should feel bad for their work, but stays strong in his belief that art is extremely important for the human as “the world would be unlivable without art.” To Rhys, art is pleasing, satisfying, and calming for the human mind. With two different opinions in this text, it is up to the reader to interpret exactly what they themselves believe, as both sides have very convincing arguments.

After reading this text, I listened to the TED talk between Guy Raz, Dre Urhahn, and artist, Jeroen Koolhaas. Jeroen won a competition to make a documentary in Rio, for MTV.  Originally, Jeroen and Urhahn went to Rio to make the documentary about Brazilian hip hop music in festivals. But, as these two men were constantly spending their time with the people, their project took a complete turn and ended up making a product that was even better than they had intended. The idea of their new project was to change people’s minds on their preconceived ideas on people and places. These men wanted people to think and “confront” their own minds. By doing this they would make a visual statement of a giant mural that would spread across multiple buildings. But, to look at this mural you would have to stand far away to see view it as a whole. Jeroen and Urhahn stayed in Brazil to do this project. They started off painting on three houses of a boy flying a kite, but everything was painted blue and the kite was not visible. Adults and kids claimed that they had to change what they were doing because blue was the color of a prison cell and they wanted to see the kite. These brazilian people and places, favelas, were assumed to be “unwelcoming, dangerous, ugly places,” the main host Raz claimed that, “And what you were trying to do is to change that perception by actually sort of overlaying this beautiful piece of artwork over the favela.” People started to notice the artwork and realized that the residents were being looked at as artists and not criminals. Jeroen and Urhahn noticed that they need to build up this energy and put more work around Rio, so they did.

After reviewing Rhys text and watching a TED talk, the two have a couple connections between them. This being of efficient thinking, love and dedication, and social class. Efficient thinking is relevant for any type/form of art as Southan points out that helping hands on instead of just donating money to a cause will make more of an impact. As for the two painters, they unintentionally started a project and used their own thinking and decided to make it bigger and spread the project further.  They spread their project to grow and make an impact. When it comes to love and dedication, both are needed when it comes to art or any form of work in one’s life. For Southan, the work that the EA are doing requires a lot of effort and love and dedication. They also believe that everyone in the world should help out, which again will require dedication and love for what they are contributing to. For artists, creating work around the world and traveling for long periods of time and creating masterpieces will require love and dedication. Last, social class, which somewhat has different views between the text and video. In the text, it is said that if one possesses more money than they should contribute more of that to the world. Whereas, in the video, social class was looked down upon and the people themselves weren’t looked at as an individual. Although, I don’t have a specific focus point for my essay, I feel as if I have a good start and have an idea on what direction to head in. Personally, I believe art is very important in a person’s life and has tremendous impacts. This brainstorming session helped quite a bit, as writing down my thoughts made it easier to connect Southan to my TED talk of choice.