Need for Art
I need art. When the day has been busy, I find my moments of solitude through reading, listening to music, or watching a movie. If I don’t, my life shrinks. I might never fully understand why I have a need for art, but I appear not to be alone in this
As long as mankind has existed, we have practiced various kinds of art. Likewise, we have spent the same time trying to answer questions such as, “what is art?” or “what do we need art for?” The ‘philosophy of art’ is as old as philosophy in itself. Aristotle’s Poetics from around 335 BC is one of the oldest and most famous pieces of ‘philosophy of art,’ that we know of. But even so, the first attempts at answering the question of art probably dates much further back than Aristotle.
Aristotle is one of the countless philosophers that pondered the concept of “What is art?” After some millennia of questioning, we have yet to find an answer.
Being a writer and a scholar of literature and philosophy, I have also been dealing with the theory of art and literature. I have tried, and am still trying, to understand what art really is. Why do we have such a superfluous phenomena as literature, painting, music, theatre and film? Not to mention rampant present day artistic practices such as ‘art of food’ – and other popular artistic expression derived from our experience economy.
Why all this art? Why all this unproductive amusement?
The answers that over time have been given to such questions have always been framed by their historical context. In religious cultures the answer has typically been that art can make us connect with the divine. With modernist or atheistic contexts, it has rather oppositely been said that art expresses the nothingness that is beyond human life and rationality. No matter how different the answers have been, they all seem to have been pointing to something “beyond the understandable” – simply because it keeps puzzling us that we have a need for this unnecessary and unproductive thing called art.
Compared to other periods of my life, I don’t “consume” much art these years. I am more than busy being the CEO of my company, and I work long hours. So I’m not able to read as much as I used to, and I also don’t get to discover a lot of new music and film. Nonetheless, sometimes late at night or during the weekend, I still pull the plug and read a book or watch a movie. I just have to – otherwise life can petrify me and I will lose my creativity.
After working without a mental break, art offers a change of pace. Pulling the plug on your mind can help your body recharge. No matter what form of art you choose, the regular consumption of it helps your creativity flow.
At work I solve things. The language I use is a problem-solver language. I like this kind of language. Business language drives us forward. Yet, my experience is that if I stay in this language and mode of thinking for too long – without encountering a more artistic, a more refined, reflective and imaginative kind of language – then my business language becomes poorer and poorer. I lose my sense of humour, I lose my playfulness and my critical faculty, and in the end I lose my productivity.
As I said, I keep wondering: “Why do I need these moments of art?” Well, it seems like I will never have the answer. I will just have to live with the simple fact: “I just do.” Maybe there really is a kind of profound wisdom to be found in this simple answer. When nobody during the history of mankind has been able to answer the question of art once and for all, then it probably has something to do with the fact that the true answer doesn’t lie in an answer – but in the doing.
Art is not theory. It is practice. It is reading, listening and experiencing. Theory is only trying to catch up with reality, and the reality of art is in the doing. So, the art of art is not so much in understanding the purpose of art – but in giving yourself the experiences with art needed in order to keep your world, your critical faculty, and your imagination alive.
Images from: here, here, and here
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