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I always tell my students, the purpose of art is not for entertainment or decoration. This applies to all the arts, from literature, theatre and music to dance, film (when a work of art) and to the visual arts, and will apply to any new art form invented by future generations.
The principles of what makes great art have not changed since ancient Greece: Art must reveal essential meaning, a universal truth, probably unrecognised, and must transmit an experience.
This implies a certain degree of complexity. How we articulate these ideas or how artists express them in their own work will change, and there will never be total agreement, but the essence of art cannot change, not without it becoming something else.
Terracotta Dancer from ancient
Greece and Picasso Dancers
There are certain characteristics common to all the arts. All art is an abstraction to some degree, with music being the most abstract. It has to be abstract to be universal and not parochial truth. And, to complete the circle, if it is universal, then all the arts, though different from each other, are bound to share characteristics and overlap. It is interesting, for example, that the rise of the modern novel coincided with the rise in portrait painting, both sharing a newly discovered interest in the psychology of the individual, while at the same time transcending him to create universal characters of the passions and aspirations of humanity in general.
A phrase you will see repeated in BrainsNet.Net is that Science informs us, whereas Art transmits an experience. But of course art does a lot more than that.
We expect art to reveal something to us that is original - a unique and private vision of the world, which is true but which only this artist has. If this sounds too subjective, especially to the scientific minds reading this page, yes it is, but always remembering that we live in a universe of infinity within infinity, and no single mind can grasp all its aspects, so it is down to artists, not scientists, to broaden our view to aspects we had not seen before, from their own unique perspective. Science does the opposite, it seeks to narrow and pinpoint what is proven objectively on a specific question (more on this under Literature.) The point being, of course, that art and science are complimentary to each other and we need both in order to come to an understanding of the world.
The purpose of Art is to give flesh to our search for meaning, and then to communicate such aspects of meaning from man to man.
Admittedly, many works of art were created by human beings setting out simply to decorate or to entertain their patrons in order to earn a living, rather than reveal universal truth, but the result turned out much greater than their intentions. We all have the primary desire to earn a comfortable, secure life for ourselves, and artists are no exception, whether they try to paint the Sistine Chapel or write a pop song. This does not negate the above statement that the purpose of art is not for entertainment or decoration. If the artist has a profound vision of the world, the result will always exceed his original intentions - indeed, it would be destructive to his work, if the artist set out self-consciously to instruct others or to achieve greatness.
Of course, there is nothing better than great art to enhance our surroundings and no better leisure pursuit, but that is not the point of art. If we do not find aesthetic pleasure in certain art, we must be careful not to dismiss it as non-art.
Conversely, not everything hanging on walls for aesthetic pleasure is art, no matter how pleasing to the eye. The purpose of painting or sculpture is not to adorn our buildings any more than literature is written to while the time away at the airport, or music to fill the air in lifts and in supermarkets. If you have seen thousands of paperbacks or pictures which offer nothing more than ephemeral distraction, that is not art. The difference between art and non-art is the depth of meaning, and this applies as much to paintings as it applies to novels, music or anything else.
An intelligent response
Under Literature, we talk about the education of the feeling. And we make a distinction between the art of literature and other forms of writing. For the individual student, the end result is the capacity for an intelligent response, firstly to the literature he reads, secondly to the arts in general, and eventually to all aspects of life.
We cannot have an intelligent response if we do not recognise true literature or do not know what literature is about and how to approach it. But does this apply equally to the other arts or other aspects of the world we live in? While a book, play or a poem require time to read, other arts offer greater immediacy of perception - for example, we can see the entire painting instantly even though it may need time subsequently to evaluate. Therefore, we need to distinguish between instinctive response and an intelligent response.
Do those responses have to coincide? The issue is complex, as it varies from art to art. The time required is one factor. The education of the feeling and our own capacity for an intelligent response is another factor. But we still could respond differently to the same piece of work on different occasions or even change our response after further consideration, or if we grow emotionally or intellectually in the future.
Music is the most abstract of the arts, so our instinctive response here is more likely to be closest to our cerebral response - but not always. Literature is the other extreme; we need to have a full grasp of the multitude of meanings in words, behind words and groups of words, let alone language in general, to fully appreciate a work of literature and engender an intelligent response, while our instinctive response will be affected by other factors - whether we like the characters, if it makes us laugh, or indeed if the subject-matter is upsetting. And in the visual arts, where we perceive the whole piece in little time, we can have an instinctive response to its aesthetics almost immediately, but a visual education would ensure our response is intelligent and will protect us from value blunders.
Art and Science
If it is true that we need both art and science to understand the world, the same also applies to any one individual. It is not one versus the other. With this in mind, it is fair to make this comparison, especially for minds who never delved into the arts, and have only an arm's length understanding of them.
Science is only one way of seeing, it is just one tool. There are others. A toolbox has a hammer and a screwdriver, and pliers, and a tape-measure etc. Each one is useful for what it was intended, but poor in every other way. You could try, but you should not use a screwdriver to knock a nail into a wall, nor the pliers to drive a screw in.
Art will never find a cure for cancer, but science is equally useless at revealing our mental and emotional world, the heights of our philosophical attainments, the complexity of our relationships, or how one man's life, character and intellectual mind differs from another. Only great art can make us grasp the full dimensions of what is happening inside ourselves and others - what makes us human.
The complexity of some scientific work and the complexity of machines we build with the resulting technology may dazzle someone into unqualified admiration for science as the ultimate tool for truth. In fact this is false. The reality is very different. Art (and the right side of our brains) can deal with much greater complexity than science - the kind of complexity which cannot be subject to linear thinking. Greater minds understand that science is limited to a certain level.
It is a common misconception among the general population that art is 'easier' because you can do whatever you like, and the outcome is just a matter of opinion or individual taste. But most of what they are thinking of is not art at all. The water-colour I painted may be simple and very pleasing and we do call it art in common parlance, but it fails to deal with important questions, reveal meaning or transmit profound experience.
It may be great craftsmanship but it is not art.
Getting an arts degree is probably easier than a science degree, but this does not mean the arts are easier. The difference is that a science degree makes you a scientist - you learn the method - but an arts degree never turned anyone into an artist. Great artists spend their whole lives discovering how difficult that is. They must start with innate talent, then learn the language of their chosen craft, find their own method, formulate their own original questions to answer, and finally create their own new world, before they can communicate that to others. Each time the artist gets close, he will discover new complexities. It is a very profound experience for them, and also for us when transmitted through their work.
In the case of literature, the advantage over science is that it can deal with truth when multifaceted or ambiguous in its very nature. The arts, and here we talk about literature as an art, have the unique quality of revealing multiple facets simultaneously. Literature can deal with the presence of contradictory meanings when neither of them is false. In quantum physics we know about the uncertainty principle, but uncertainty is not exclusive to subatomic particles, it permeates the world we live in at a deep level. It is the difference between what is, and what could be, and what is knowable. It is how our universe is constructed, in order for it to offer infinite possibilities. Literature, out of all the arts, deals best with such ambiguities in our everyday world and reveals its true complexity. Some modern art, as in painting and sculpture, also found ways of doing something similar, as in the great cubist paintings, e.g. by Pablo Picasso.
Confronting complexity applies to exploring as well as creating art. As a student of both art and science myself, I found that the thinking in the arts is much more complex and difficult, whether in writing, dancing or in the visual arts, but it all depends on which level you work at. And it is a different kind of complexity. Maths, like the three body problem which NASA had to solve for spacecraft to arrive within a few meters and within seconds of a target billions of miles and indeed years away in space, required a mental feat of huge complexity. But at least one knew exactly what the problem was from the start and could work towards a provable, testable, recognisable solution, then just replicate it for future missions.
The difference in creating art is that you start with infinite possibilities and every step you take reveals more. Your every solution is a new cross-roads opening up ever-increasing options. You have to take millions of tiny decisions in a fraction of a second, you must not lose your way, and there is no method for doing it. It cannot be done by formula and there is no point of arrival, only perpetual progress.
Today, cosmology tries to understand concepts on a vast scale, about objects infinitely large and infinitesimally small, way beyond our reach, but the answers are unlikely to come from science the method. More likely, they will emerge from what Einstein called thought experiments, which is closer to philosophy and to creative thinking in the arts. That was how he conceived relativity. It was much later, after his death, that Einstein's answers were proven scientifically.
Herbert Read said, "The artist sets out on a voyage of exploration, takes many false turns, retreats occasionally, but always persists, always moves, and gradually approaches his destination. But long before he gets near to that destination he has, as it were, been carried away by the momentum of his own creating. The forms he has gradually realised and perfected have taken on a life of their own, and pursue a logical development which the artist could not change if he would - short of giving up the adventure."
And it is a similar journey for any non-artist who simply wants to explore
the arts.
© John K
Smyrniotis
London 2018
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