Why art?

 

 Why Art?

I came across this quote of Jack Chambers after I’d written everything following it. I think Chambers is right: the desire to share one’s delight in the world is fundamental. I think that we make art for the same reason we do science: We want to make sense of the world. We want to perceive meaning. With both science and art we attempt to organise our experience into shapes that feel orderly and significant, which is a pompous way of saying we want to account for the unaccountable fact that we perceive beauty and truth. Keats equates beauty with truth. That’s also what mathematicians claim. Anyone who makes or performs any kind of art knows that it’s true. All art on this page made by me.

“The artist may hope to redeem man’s reality by showing him the world as it looks when it is loved.” (Jack Chambers, ca. 1978)

Why art? Many years ago, I took a course in the philosophy of art, and that was one of many questions that it didn’t answer. Psychology and anthropology note that the making of art is species-specific, and that it figures in everything from attracting a mate to shaping religious ritual to asserting social status. Does that mean that art has only such utilitarian functions, or is there something more to it?

Another question was the value of expertise. Does it or does it not increase one’s pleasure? Is there such a thing as educated taste? After all, how do you differentiate the pleasure derived from educated taste from that of untutored delight? As the man-in-the-street is supposed to have said, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” And why should the taste of the person knowledgeable in the history of some art determine what’s worth looking at or reading or listening to? Isn’t educated taste just someone else’s taste that for some reason one deems superior to one’s own? Besides, educated taste looks suspiciously like the taste of people who can pay more for art than you can afford. What do rarity and price have to do with the value of art? Isn’t a lot of great art simply that which the privileged classes patronise?

What’s a classic? Isn’t it just some old work that has found admirers many years or centuries after its first audience has died off? Or maybe it’s just what the sons and daughters of privileged families have read during their expensive university education, and which now functions as a signal of belonging to that class of people.

Besides, aren’t popular literature, painting, theatre and music popular precisely because most people haven’t benefitted from the training in taste and insight their social betters have received?

As you can see, these questions all implicitly assume some answer to the question, Why art?

2021-12-13