Q22 - Laurie: In a democracy, public art should

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
ID the Disagreement

Stimulus Breakdown:
L: Public art should bring people together, either by showing us a consenus when one exists or by helping us to bring together disparate opinions, while respecting each one. Since public art creates only antagonism, it's failing at its task.
E: If people have radically diff opinions, public art should emphasize that. You're asking public art to do the impossible.

Answer Anticipation:
This was a tricky one for me to articulate the disagreement. Elsa clearly thinks Laurie is asking public art to do something impossible: what, though? It revolves around situations when people hold radically different opinions. L thinks public art should help people bring those opinions together in mutual respect. E think public art should emphasize the radical difference in opinion. It seems like they disagree about whether public art should try to bring disparate opinions together or emphasize the differences. They also seem to disagree about whether bringing people together via reconciling their different opinions is even possible.

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) "which type is MOST characteristic of contemporary democracies" is both too specific and out of scope. Neither person stated an opinion on this.

(B) Close, but no. They do disagree about whether it's possible in a democracy for public art to bring people together by helping them reconcile their radically different opinions. But the concept of whether people will "enjoy or support" this art is out of scope.

(C) YES. L would consider it a success if public art reconciled people's differences in opinion. E would consider it a success if public art emphasized people's differences in opinion.

(D) E doesn’t address this. She might well agree, since she's claiming that having public art achieve harmony is impossible.

(E) E doesn't address this. Her critique has to do with circumstances in which there are radically different opinions. Also, whether a certain form of public art "is wise" is different from "what it should be".

Takeaway/Pattern: This seemed like a tougher than average question for me. In retrospect, we definitely have visible overlap on the page showing that both speakers addressed what public art should do. For me, it was hard to hear L's position and E's position as mutually exclusive. It seemed like you could potentially say that "public art could emphasize radically different opinions while simultaneously helping people to reconcile their differences and respect the validity of other opinions." But the fact that Elsa says "what you're asking public art to do is impossible" tells us that she, at least, considers them mutually exclusive.

#officialexplanation

[AshleyT786]

So this question really got me. I chose answer choice E because I thought Laurie would agree since she states outright that contemporary art only creates acrimony, aka no consensus is expressed and I thought Elsa would DISagree because she says achieving such a consensus is impossible. Is it too much of an assumption to assume that because something is impossible to achieve, that would thereby make it unwise? In the post above, it states that saying what should be and what is wise are two different things. Why are they different?

As for answer choice C, I can see how L would agree with that but how does E disagree? They have different viewpoints on what the goal of public art should be but how can I connect to the idea of success? How is that not adding any unwarranted assumptions?