Freedom of My Mind

But first: why are we on this earth? I was taught as a child that we are put on this earth to worship the Lord; but we don’t need art to worship the Lord; all that is required is to “worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” Worship is open to all people, in all stations of life, regardless of talent or ability.

So, what is art useful for? Is it is as exalted as we like to think it is?

This is difficult, because art is a slippery concept. How should we even define art? Out of curiosity, I checked with the Encyclopedia Britannica, which defines art as “a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination.” This seems a sterile definition. The Cambridge Dictionary is more banal: “the making of objects, images, music, etc. that are beautiful or that express feelings.”

The difficulty – and the beauty – is that art is intangible. A painting may be concrete, but it’s artistic merit is not. Neither is its value or its affect on us.

This question is not far from the kinds of questions Socrates would discuss, as told in Plato’s dialogues, when he asked fellow Athenians what is beauty or justice or courage. Someone would offer a definition and he would point out that they had given him a checklist of things that share in beauty or justice or courage, but a checklist does not capture the essential nature of it.

Are we in the realm of a Platonic Form, then, and in a Platonic dialogue showing that no one in fact knows what it is? For Plato, a Platonic Form is an abstraction that constitutes the highest reality of a concept. The usual example is a circle. There is no such thing as a perfect circle in the universe. There are only examples of circles, which we recognize as circles, because they share in the nature of circleness. We are comparing them, in a way, to the abstract, Platonic circle, the perfect circle.

So, like beauty or justice, would Plato suggest different art forms share in the higher form that is Art? But then, according to Plato, what follows is that we need to learn to appreciate Art itself, and not all the different arts that partake in a small way of it. I’m not sure I buy this, because then it would follow that my love of, say, ballet should serve as a gateway to a higher appreciation of Art. Love of ballet would no longer be the point, but a conduit for love and understanding of something higher. This is not attractive, because it seems to me to be enough to love ballet for its own sake.

There is perhaps another way to approach the value of art, and it stems from my belief that words are inadequate to describe all human experience.

One book provided me a key for understanding this. I’m still not sure why I have this book or where it came from, but I suspect it came from a library book sale. It is called Exploring Poetry by M.L. Rosenthal and A.J. M. Smith. It was written in 1955 and was probably a university text book at some point.

In chapter 1, the authors write about the importance of voice in poetry, and how that voice determines the form of the poem: “By an ordering of words we mean that the formal rhetorical structure of a poem is one of the essential means by which the voice of the poem communicates what it has to say. That is, the choice of individual words (the diction), the phrasing, the structure of the sentences, and the pattern of the whole poem all play their part in presenting the complete meaning.

I take this to mean that poetry occurs when the meaning of the poem is inseparable from form. I do not mean that form equals meaning, but that meaning cannot be presented separately. If you could present the meaning separately, then why chose to write a poem at all? You could just as easily write an essay or a novel or a play. My suggestion is that the meaning of a sonnet by Shakespeare cannot be fully extricated from the form (the sonnet) that he chose to write in.

[I am indebted to Gary Saul Morson and Morton Shapiro, authors of Cents and Sensibility: What Economists Can Learn from the Humanities, for their suggestion in their book that the novel has something to teach us, with a complexity and humanity that cannot be encompassed in dry prose or a mere essay.]

I suggest that this is true with all forms of art. The meaning in a ballet cannot be fully separated from its history, choreography, music, style, performance, etc. The same can be said for cinema or a symphony or a painting. Meaning is enmeshed with the form. In that sense, then, art is communication that is inseparable from the chosen form, with all its structures, rules, vocabulary, skills, and precedents.

This is not a hard and fast definition, however, and is perhaps too vague. However, it might be a good thing. I can’t help wondering that if we could nail down a definition, without ambiguity or vagueness, we wouldn’t need art in the first place.

It is a central tenet of my belief in the power of art that the meaning should be beyond words. This is true even for art forms based on the use of words. Otherwise, it would mean that truth and reality were constrained by of our language, but we don’t have language for everything that exists. Otherwise, differing art forms would be redundant.

George Saunders wrote in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life that the work of a good writer should always be a little smarter than the writer. There is not a chance on earth Shakespeare meant even a tiny fraction of all the things scholars have found in his work. Once again, I believe this is true of all forms of art.

In short, art occurs when meaning is inseparable from form. And the reason we have different arts is because meaning and existence and reality and truth are beyond words. We need every means of expression we can get to come even close (which isn’t very close).

So, asking what art is good for is a bit like asking what language is good for. Its good for the same reasons.