what the hell is art for?
Wednesday 19 May 2004
Blah blah, everybody's asked (and answered) this question every possible way. So here's my 2-cent's worth. It's not the final answer, and it doesn't exclude drugs, sex or anything else. But one of the things art is for is to mediate between what we know and what we don't know. Both for the artist and the audience. You use what you know, which is relatively little, and try to explain or figure out what you don't know, which is a lot.
Which is why art is still important. Because as we get more sophisticated as a species, as science expands to tackle more problems in greater detail, the things we don't know become more numerous. And the explanations get more arcane, and difficult for the layperson to understand. So art has to expand into the gap between what humans as a species understand, and what humans as individuals understand.
But more than that, the role of artist and philosopher overlap. Each explains by analogy, attempts to tease out implications of certain bits of knowledge, draws connections between disparate areas. It's not surprising people get an inflated sense of their own importance, sometimes even take on a priestly role.
As a kind of aside that's not an aside (if that makes sense), it seems that this growing gap between what we know individually, and the knowledge that's available to us, can help partially explain the rise since the mid-80s of religious fundamentalism and various spiritualisms. As uncertainty and insecurity grow, and that gap can represent uncertainty and insecurity, so it's natural to try and find certainty and security. And religion and spiritualism can provide that certainty. Maybe this uncertainty is the engine that keeps religions running even in the utter absence of supporting evidence. Just as what set major religions running may have been progress. There's been a recent translation from the French of a book suggesting that a certain degree of human development was required before religions could spread to become national or larger. One of the prerequisites is written language, which allows ideas to be spread in a relatively fixed form. Another is the development of regular trade links between different areas. This kind of regular contact allows people to see that there are things in common between disparate areas and people. Essentially, while people live in small, largely illiterate groupings, it's more intelligible for them to believe in local gods and spirits whose sphere of influence is strictly limited. The wider their world, the wider the possibilities for their deities, which does suggest that religion might be an ego-related phenomena. It also suggests that monotheisms have an advantage over other beliefs at this stage of development, being more generally applicable. Whereas local deities and spirits have more localised and particular meaning, and hence less universal appeal.
But although some artists may feel a religious pull I don't think it's their role to provide that certainty. I believe it because mediation is not explanation, because to accept that there are things unknown runs counter to the need of religions to ascribe meaning and intent to things. I believe that art presents a world transformed by imagination, an image of what we see, that this is how mediation is achieved, and that mediation demands transformation, a world presented in analogy.
Blah blah, everybody's asked (and answered) this question every possible way. So here's my 2-cent's worth. It's not the final answer, and it doesn't exclude drugs, sex or anything else. But one of the things art is for is to mediate between what we know and what we don't know. Both for the artist and the audience. You use what you know, which is relatively little, and try to explain or figure out what you don't know, which is a lot.
Which is why art is still important. Because as we get more sophisticated as a species, as science expands to tackle more problems in greater detail, the things we don't know become more numerous. And the explanations get more arcane, and difficult for the layperson to understand. So art has to expand into the gap between what humans as a species understand, and what humans as individuals understand.
But more than that, the role of artist and philosopher overlap. Each explains by analogy, attempts to tease out implications of certain bits of knowledge, draws connections between disparate areas. It's not surprising people get an inflated sense of their own importance, sometimes even take on a priestly role.
As a kind of aside that's not an aside (if that makes sense), it seems that this growing gap between what we know individually, and the knowledge that's available to us, can help partially explain the rise since the mid-80s of religious fundamentalism and various spiritualisms. As uncertainty and insecurity grow, and that gap can represent uncertainty and insecurity, so it's natural to try and find certainty and security. And religion and spiritualism can provide that certainty. Maybe this uncertainty is the engine that keeps religions running even in the utter absence of supporting evidence. Just as what set major religions running may have been progress. There's been a recent translation from the French of a book suggesting that a certain degree of human development was required before religions could spread to become national or larger. One of the prerequisites is written language, which allows ideas to be spread in a relatively fixed form. Another is the development of regular trade links between different areas. This kind of regular contact allows people to see that there are things in common between disparate areas and people. Essentially, while people live in small, largely illiterate groupings, it's more intelligible for them to believe in local gods and spirits whose sphere of influence is strictly limited. The wider their world, the wider the possibilities for their deities, which does suggest that religion might be an ego-related phenomena. It also suggests that monotheisms have an advantage over other beliefs at this stage of development, being more generally applicable. Whereas local deities and spirits have more localised and particular meaning, and hence less universal appeal.
But although some artists may feel a religious pull I don't think it's their role to provide that certainty. I believe it because mediation is not explanation, because to accept that there are things unknown runs counter to the need of religions to ascribe meaning and intent to things. I believe that art presents a world transformed by imagination, an image of what we see, that this is how mediation is achieved, and that mediation demands transformation, a world presented in analogy.
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