Artists play an important social role. In the words of the philosopher Henri Bergson, their function is “to see and to make us see what we do not naturally perceive”—to show “things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness.” Artists achieve these effects by tinkering with the deepest conventions in our brains—exposing our cultural assumptions, pointing out contradictions in our customs, creating new symbols, and expanding the meaning of old symbols.
