HOMECOMING Homecoming '69 was begun with a burst of fireworks and smoke on Monday night of the memorial week. The annual Flaming "W" bonfires accompanied the brilliant display and the evening's activities were illuminated by the combined glow. The letter remained lighted at night throughout the week. Monday's Spirit Stomp had the largest attendance of any dance ever held in the New Union ballroom. Celeste Jensen, a Brigham City Sophomore, reigned over Homecoming, with Karol Knudson and Joan Barber sharing her court. The Feline Follies, annual alumni talent show, drew crowds to the Fine Arts theatre on Wednesday. The following night, a special theater rally was held for the football team at the Wilshire Theatre. I begin, therefore, by affirming thta 'the arts are a faculty of man, a power and a creation. Imagination, their vital, central impulse, has at all times been regarded as divine.' We must examine our way of life -our social structure, our methods of production and distribution, the accumulation of capital and the incidence of taxation, to decide whether it is not in these factors that we should look for an explanation of our aesthetic impotence. To do this in detail would be a task for a separate book, but I have written much on the subject in the past and would now only point briefly to two or three characteristics of our civilization which are patently inimical to the arts. The first is the general phenomenon of alienation. The term is used to denote both a social and a psychological problem, but these are but two aspects of the same problem: progressive divorce of human faculties from natural processes. If seeing and handling, touching and hearing and all the refinements of sensation that developed historically in the conquest of nature and the manipulation of material substances are not educated and trained from birth to maturity the result is a being that hardly deserves to be called human. The decline of religious worship is doubtless the inevitable consequence of a growth of scientific progress which has not been accompanied by any equivalent progress in ethical standards is frequently regretted. But it is not so often observed that the same forces that have destroyed the mystery of holiness have destroyed the mystery of beauty. One must mention a characteristic of our way of life which however solidly based on our cherished ideals of democracy is inimical to art. Values of art are not determined by a general level of aesthetic sensibility, but by the bets aesthetic sensibility available at any particular time. Art is eternally disturbing, permanently revolutionary. It is so because the artist, in the degree of his greatness, always confronts the unknown, and what he brings back from that confrontation is a novelty, a new symbol, a new vision of life, the outer image of inward things. I believe that there is only one way of saving our civilization and that is by so reforming its constituent societies that, in the sense of the phrases already defined, the concrete sensuous phenomena of art are once more spontaneously manifested in our daily lives: education through art. But education through art does not fir human beings for the mindless and mechanical actions of modern industry; it does not reconcile them to a leisure devoid of constructive purpose; it does not leave them satisfied with passive entertainment. Herbert Read-Art and Alienation