Grendel's Misunderstanding of ArtHumans have used art for centuries as a response to their environments. The use of icons, perspective and cubism all reflect the cultures and societies of those times. However, art has often been mistakenly considered a replacement or creation of reality, rather than a reflection. John Gardner took up this attitude in his novel Grendel. Although Grendel is a provocative and innovative work, John Gardner's views on art, as reflected in Grendel, are based on a misunderstanding of art and are therefore unfounded. Grendel Gardner interprets art as a type of cultural propaganda. For example: “the old man sang of a glorious mead whose light would shine to the ends of the ragged world… There he would sit and distribute treasures… to the final generation” (47). Or again: "If the songs were true, as I suppose at least one or two were, wars would always have been there, and what I had seen was only a period of mutual exhaustion." (34). The phrase "Oceania was at war with Eurasia; Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia" comes to mind (1984, 236-237). Gardner uses Grendel's quotes to show humans attempting to change the past to reduce the image of barbarism and violence. In assigning this role to the Shaper, representative of art in the novel, Gardner declares that this is the role of art: to falsify the past to enrich the present. Falsification of the past is something best left to propagandists and revisionists rather than artists. While it is true that artists draw on ideas from the past, artists apply those ideas to the present and future, as will be shown. Gardner is sadly mistaken in believing that the role of the artist is to refine the past... in the middle of paper... it is possible that with an informed and ecological approach to media (technology) we could create our own order of existence. Tentative guidelines for such an undertaking can be found in Marshall and Eric McLuhan's Laws of Media. John Gardner used Grendel as an argument to proclaim that art is actually cultural propaganda, a lie to improve human existence and the creator of a rational order in our world. Art, however, is none of the ideas mentioned above. Art is the human effort to escape the deadly effects of our artificial environments and the primary way to maintain our humanity. Works Cited Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Random House, Inc., 1971. McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric. Read about the media. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1949.