#abedin

You might have seen some worldwide celebrated artworks like “Mona Lisa”, “The Starry Night”, “The scream” and thought- you’re not intellectual enough to understand the art and relate to the core message of the work, let’s leave it for the great minds and the deep thinkers to unravel it. But no. Art is for anyone who wants to experience it. Songs you like, movies you watch, choreographies you’ve seen, crafts people make, a poem you tried to write, even a quilt that your grandma made- all of that and more is art. Art has been around for thousands of years and has evolved throughout the time based on geography, climate, resource availability and even individual choice. The biggest artists all around the globe did put their colors to magic under certain situations, trying to tell certain stories- but experiencing art is a totally different subject.

Understanding art is not equivalent to experiencing and feeling the emotions from it. Art is for anyone who wants to experience it. Art is anything that stirs emotion in you and it depends on your story, your shaping of life and who you are- when it comes to your take on the piece. If you take a group of people and show them an artwork, they’ll all have their individual diverse reactions to it. Different perceptions, different observations. Some might find it beautiful and some might just not. After all, everyone is entitled to their own preferences. If you don’t happen to like a sculpture that maybe your friend likes, it doesn’t devalue you or the sculpture. A part of the sculpture’s value comes from the reasoning why your friend admires it so much and you can always learn something new from it, have a fresh point of view.

Everyone reacts to art differently and has the potential to grow and learn from it. Art is a diverse range of human activity which opens a portal of personal experience for you to draw meaning from, according to your own insight and impression of it. The term art is really just a label.

Art is everywhere.

Art is existence.

I GOT MY TABLET WORKING AGAIN JUST LAST NIGHT

I’M SO HAPPY

Image from Getty Images, via The Independent

As conservatives and Republicans circle the wagons to try to discredit former FBI Director James Comey--a lifelong Republican himself, whose praises they previously sang--one of their criticisms is that he admitted refusing Trump’s multiple requests to announce publicly that Trump himself was not under FBI investigation, although at that time it was the truth. In their zealousness to paint Comey as a partisan hack, however, they’ve forgotten his reason:

“The FBI and the Department of Justice had been reluctant to make public statements that we did not have an open case on President Trump for a number of reasons, most importantly because it would create a duty to correct, should that change.”

A “duty to correct,” eh?

If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the stated reason Comey was obligated to notify Congress, just days before the 2016 election, that the FBI was looking at more emails related to its previously closed investigation of Hillary Clinton and her team. Having publicly declared that the investigation was closed, Comey had a duty to inform Congress when that status changed. Which, as virtually everyone on both sides of the political fence agrees, placed inordinate emphasis on something that looked potentially damaging to Clinton, and did so at a supremely inopportune moment.

Comey was just trying to protect his boss, the President of the United States, from being stuck in a similarly damaging situation.