Works of Art and Works of Information: Reflections for the Twentieth Anniversary of the Women Art Series, Mabel Smith Douglass Library

Abstract

Works work when by stimulating inquisitive looking, sharpening perception, raising visual intelligence, widening perspectives, bringing out new connections and contrasts . . . they participate in the organization and reorganization of experience, and thus in the making and remaking of our worlds. . . . Sensation and perception and feeling and reason are all facets of cognition, and they affect and are affected by each other. Works work when they inform vision; inform not by supplying information but by forming or reforming or transforming vision; vision not as confined to ocular perception but as understanding in general. . . . Works work by interacting with all our experience and all our cognitive processes in the continuing advancement of our understanding.-Nelson Goodman 1. I. Every thoughtful experience of information contributes to the construction of identity. We are formed by the structures and processes that inform us; gradually, we create ourselves as we resolve our unknowns. Among all possible information structures and processes, those of the library are special. In our culture, the library is a humanizing instrument. It contains expansive tools, requires reflective thinking, depends on communication, and conducts the learner toward inspired transformations of mind. The more informed and powerful we become, the more we require both passion and imagination to shape our future. When we encounter works of art amid works of information in the library, it is possible to see how they contribute mutually to the construction of a questioning, responsive life-how they contribute, in Nelson Goodmans words, to the making and remaking of our worlds.