The Purpose of Art (1/2) (869 Words)
Preface
This is the first part of a pair of essays on art. The second is The Value of Art.
These essays are a shade less rigorous than my essays on linguistic (and presumably other essays I write in the future). Unlike those, which seek to defend a thesis statement, the purpose of this is more to just share the thesis — I think it's a valuable idea. So I'll still try to write in terms that are accurate, but I won't be as precise — just as much as I need to be.
Language is Bad, Art is Good
If you read my linguistics essays, you'll see that I don't think language is fundamentally very good at conveying human experience. As I highlight in Corrections, it does an okay job at logical experience, but as I point out in Advice, for the vast majority of illogical experience, even associative language struggles.
I know that's a lot of links — only experience is really important for the sake of the essay (read it now before moving on, it's just a definition). The rest enrich the thesis, but aren't central to the argument. Suffice to say that experience is, well, experienced, and language doesn't do a great job at communicating what that's like.
Art, by contrast, is extremely powerful. It can immediately induce experiences, without needing to carefully craft a picture using associations. I won't explain this in depth, because if you've done any literary analysis, or photography, etc, you'll know this is a major selling point of art. If you really aren't sure what I mean, look at this photo, or go read poetry.
It's hard to say this is the purpose of art — art doesn't have a purpose, per se, it just is. But without a doubt, this is something it excels at.
I should mention that I abuse the term "art" a bit — not all normative art induces experience, and not everything that induces experience is normative art. But the two categories are similar enough that I just use "art" to refer to this slightly different set.
Wait, isn't that other set really big? Don't we experience everything? Yes, technically. What I actually refer to is a very specific subset of inducers that are (a) static (in a chronological sense, i.e. intransient, though this also isn't quite the right word), which includes performance art — performance art is to art as showing you a painting is to the painting (b) exposes you to the nature of life. This second restriction falls into the category of "thing that makes sense, but only because you don't know what I mean" (as put forward in Advice) — fear not, I haven't defined it yet. And I won't until my second art essay — I haven't laid the groundwork yet. Suffice to say I use "art" to refer to a set that mostly overlaps with normative art, but with a few exclusions and inclusions.
Art Imitates Life (but Who Cares?)
It's easy to say that art induces experience in a detached definitional sense. But it's worth taking a moment to think about what that means. Life creates experiences by nature of being life — that's how I define an experience. But to have art do the same thing is kind of crazy when you think about it. Take photography as an example. A good photo can make you feel tension, apprehension, fear, peace, etc. This seems obvious, but the point is that you're looking at some paper, or some pixels, and it feels like looking at life. In inducing experience, the artistic form becomes something that can statically capture a little bit of the nature of being alive.
At this point, you may be saying "so what," for a couple of different reasons. The first is that you feel like what I'm saying is really simple — everyone knows that art can make you feel things. And "art imitates life" is a super common motif — what am I on about? If this is you, I'm sorry. Go read Advice. You have to figure it out yourself. This is something I understand experientially, but not well enough that I can explain it better than this. Hopefully in reading on, it will become clearer what I mean.
The second is that you get what I'm saying, but you're not sure why I'm saying it. Sure, art acts as a kind of lightning-in-a-bottle for the experience of being alive, which is kind of cool, but why does it matter? To steelman this point a bit more, art does a good job of inducing illogical experiences, but fails miserably at logical ones — it lacks precision. Though not as much as language, it also relies on the associations of the viewer — they are the lens through which the art is parsed. So yes, art induces experience, which is kind of cool. But cool isn't useful — art seemingly isn't precise enough to be useful.
This is not the case. Mankind did not understand lightning until first inventing electricity. Through capturing life in a bottle and studying it, we can dissect it. It turns out this is very important — I explain why in the second essay in this pair.