What is the purpose of art?
Hi all, I really liked the discussion about what makes us human so thought we could try another one. Look forward to reading your answers below :) ____________________________________________________ Art stimulates your senses. If your senses are stimulated you feel happy. If you feel happy, your mental and physical functions are improved to an optimal level. If your mental and physical power is on top, you can work and perform better. No matter what you do for a living, if you believe it or not.....we are all working together for one single reason. If you could take a giant step out from this world, and study mankind from a global perspective, you would learn that the human being, just like any other fellow species, actually lives, works and fights for one single and ultimate reason only. This reason which is “The Highest Purpose”, is nothing more, and nothing less, than the struggle to maintain our existence for ever, no matter what it takes... “Art makes us live for ever” Kennet _______________________________________________________ Well, I couldn’t be more with Kennet on this question, which has been much on my mind of late anyway. A dear old friend, the painter, Raymond Obermayr, and a lot of others with whom I was recently united during a visit to the US. Ray insisted that I read “Homo Aestheticus”, by Ellen Dissanayake. He is a longtime mentor, and I do what he tells me. Ellen’s book, and the personal statements of those artists I mentioned, while each expresses it in a highly personal way, all seem to agree on the essential character of the art-making behavior. So the question “What is the purpose of art?” (the title of Ellen’s first book is “What is art for?”) is also essential. Rosalie Sorrels claims that her great purpose in writing and singing is to satisfy the need to do so. I wish I could provide the source of my favorite story about art, in which a child (maybe one of Kennet’s?), upon learning the answer to his question, “What do you do at work, Daddy?” is “I teach grownups how to draw.”, with genuine incredulity exclaims, “You mean they forget!”. It’s no coincidence that, in tandem with Ellen’s book, I am reading Richard Dawkins path-breaking work on genetic evolution, “The Selfish Gene”. I am becoming more and more intrigued by a notion that, along with specific physiological specifications for elemental aspects of organisms, is also imparted something that amounts to the germ of that need that Rosalie cites. After all, what is more exemplary of the nature of art than the Art of Nature, as exemplified not only by millions of individual species of life forms, but each one genetically unique? I am beginning to think that the purpose of art is to ensure the continued existence of matter in the universe, from the neutrino to the galaxy. Perhaps it is the same impulse in humans to “make special” that Ellen says is at the heart of the artistic impulse, that causes certain subatomic particles to defy Newton’s law of motion, becoming self-excited to the point that it causes itself to move. Jack Large ________________________________________________________ Chris B ... “Crispy” - exp.3