Preface

This is the second part of a pair of essays on art. The first is The Purpose of Art.

Again, Advice isn't a prerequisite, per se, but this essay will be extremely hard to read if you don't understand its core concept.

This is an essay on art, but it's also an essay on how to be happy. It's thus worth clarifying what I mean by "happiness." There are (as far as I'm aware of) three kinds of happiness: fun, connection with others, and appreciation of beauty. The first is mainly either "being passive" (e.g. doom scrolling or playing games alone), or secretly a subset of the second (e.g. playing games with friends). So I guess there are two. Really, there might only be one — thinking about it, I'm somewhat convinced the second is secretly a subset of the third, for reasons that will become apparent if you read on. But I'm not sure, so I'll leave it as separate for now. Figure this one out on your own, and let me know if you have thoughts. Regardless, for the purpose of this essay we're only going to consider the third, which I claim is the most powerful of the three anyway.

Ways of Thinking

I know I ended part one with a bit of a cliffhanger, but before we get to that, we need to talk about art in isolation. In fact, we need to talk about STEM. If you're someone who has put care into STEM fields, you'll understand the value of knowing different problem solving approaches. I call these "ways of thinking" ("ontological organizations" is another term for this, but that feels like linguistic overkill) — knowing how to think about a physics problem, or a comp CS problem, or a topology problem often proves surprisingly useful for, say, algebra. I think of these as multipliers — the size of your "toolbox" (to use a common term for this) multiplies your understanding of the specific field. I find this idea fairly self explanatory, but if you want further reading, it's explained thoroughly (though rather inelegantly/unceremoniously) here. This property makes sense — at a very high level of abstraction, all of these fields are extensions of logic, so it's not surprising that approaches often transfer (yes, I know empiricism and science are not logic, but you understand my point).

I claim that art has the same property. Understanding different artforms allows for a deeper interpretation and appreciation of any given work. A broad understanding of art acts as a multiplier of one's skill in a specific form. And the same abstraction argument applies: this should be the case, because all artforms are fundamentally reflections of life (as argued in part 1).

Life is Beautiful, Life is Art

There's a saying I like, partly because it's comically opaque: "life is life, but life is also beautiful." My point here is that it's really easy to take life for granted by virtue of, well, being alive. I don't mean this in the conventional "don't take life for granted, thank the universe every day when you wake up sense." Rather, you're alive. You experience. All the time. That's fucking awesome, no? Life is, put simply, really aesthetic. What I'm saying with "life is life, but life is also beautiful" is "don't let the joy life presents you get desaturated by the sheer amount of life life presents you" (that sentence is very easy to interpret in bad faith — if you didn't quite get it until then, but now you think you do, try again).

Life is often beautiful, but we usually can't see it. When art is beautiful, it's because it captures a piece of life, and separates it from us enough that we can recognize its beauty. Indeed, I think this is actually how all of aesthetics works, but that's a bigger claim for a longer essay. (At some point you may realize that the definition for art as established in the first essay is completely circular — this is fine. It has meaning in the intuitive sense, and follows the thesis of Advice, and this essay was never meant to be rigorous anyway).

Even outside of art, there are times when we manage to see the beauty of life. These are usually times when we are suddenly (or thoroughly) brought into contact with the nature of being alive, and, in recognizing it, the protective barrier it forms between us and appreciation for the beauty of experience breaks down a bit. This is a very hard thing to explain, so I'll give a couple of examples, and hopefully it will become clear. The first is very strong emotion, during which the nature of being alive is clear. The second is when you reach a view on a hike, or look up at the stars at night — moments where you're brought to see yourself as more than just the subject of a passive experience of being alive (this is, again, hard to explain and hard to understand. Truly think about the feeling of looking up at the stars, or down at a city — what it is to be in those moments — and try to figure out what I mean).

I think the best way to phrase all of this is that the beauty of life is accessible when you step away from being "me" and understand that you're living a life.

"Living a life" is the best I could do, because there really isn't a better term. I also considered "alive," and "human," but these felt even worse. What's really happening here is that you briefly, aware of it or not, recognize what it is to "be."

As mentioned, these are moments where the beauty of life pushes through to you forcefully. But you can also train yourself to see it (and should — it's transcendental). It's called being an artist! Recall that by "artist" I don't mean you know how to draw, I mean you know how to capture beautiful moments of life. Take photography as an example. Being a good photographer (except for a bit of skill with a camera) is solely about recognizing and capturing beautiful moments of life. Yes, composition, light balance, leading lines, etc. are all essential to taking a good photo that induces an experience on the viewer. But a photo is, more than any other form of art, purely a static representation of the moment. So when you're learning these pieces of what makes a compelling photo, yes, you're technically learning about what makes a photo beautiful, but you're really just learning what makes life beautiful. A photo will induce emotion if and only if the scene itself induces emotion. Because art is about capturing moments, learning art is really just learning to recognize beautiful moments. Photography is the most literal application, but it applies to cinematography and literature as well fairly immediately. These are the only three I'm well versed in, but even as someone with no experience I can imagine how painting, or even musical composition, would lend itself to seeing beauty in life.

The obvious question: is this actually the same beauty I brought up earlier when you recognize being? I claim it is. I claim when you recognize being, you escape the perspective on the world of passively being alive. And this is what looking at the world artistically does — it escapes the perspective of just being alive by giving you a new lens to look at the world through. Learn photography and take evening walks in the city. You'll get what I mean. There's another saying I like: "life is life, but life is also art." I feel as though it encapsulates this idea.

Literary Analysis on Life

This last saying is actually quite important. Recall that I claimed that understanding various artforms allows you to more deeply grasp a specific work, regardless of the field — most of the ideas transfer, because all art is a reflection of life. The key point here is that "art" has been referring to things which induce experience (there was also a restriction about being static, but that's not problematic for this argument so I won't address it). Notably, life induces experience. This is trivially and definitionally true, but it's also extremely important. It means that the multiplier from a broad understanding of art applies to your appreciation of the beauty of life. Which is crazy, but, in my experience, true.

A simple example of this is photography — I can appreciate a sunset more deeply if the scene is compositionally balanced. It adds a layer of depth to the experience. Obviously I can't force it — it's not like just thinking about what it would look like if it were a photo enhances the experience. But I ask myself "if this were a photo, would there be details I appreciate." And if there are leading lines on the water directing my attention to the sunset, it's all the more beautiful for it.

My favorite question of this kind is literary — were this a scene in a book, how would it be described? What motifs would appear? What themes? Specifically, what would be the metaphorical significance of certain aspects? Again, it's not like I think about this non-stop when looking at the world. But, especially when the world is already beautiful, something will pop out at me and enhance the experience. When my mind is idle, I let it chew on this question a bit — I'm usually pleasantly surprised.

A Shortcut: Music

Another way to frame this is that in the "life is life, but life is also art" sense, at the same time as I experience a sunset, I also experience a photo of the sunset, and a film scene of the sunset, and a narrative about me at the sunset, etc. And I pull out elements of each that would induce an experience aligned with what I am actually experiencing from life, and allow them to complement and enhance it. (This actually also provides a nice explanation for why art helps you see beauty: even if I'm not directly experiencing beauty to enhance, I can still extract it from the other artforms, and they can still stack with each other).

I don't understand drawing, and I can't get that piece artificially. It's not like I can just pull out a drawing of a sunset and have it do the same thing — (a) I would need exactly the right drawing, and (b) that's stupid. And yet, it turns out you can kind of just do this with music. Music tends to induce very broad experiences — that is, they can align with just about anything vaguely similar. And it gets around (b) as well by being passive. I've personally found that even knowing very little about composition, playing relatively on-theme music is one of the greatest contributors to beauty. You even get occasional massive gains when the music actually aligns perfectly with the experience. I know the statement is a bit of a joke, but I can't help but attribute "when you're happy, you enjoy the music, but when you're sad, you understand the lyrics" to this idea (again, this statement is mostly a joke, don't let it allow you to interpret my ideas in bad faith).

A Final Note

As I've said many times, even if I explain the theory and how I think about it, this idea is fundamentally very "you have to figure it out on your own-y," and very hard to give examples on. I try here.

Editor's Note

Reading this essay back the next day, as the person with the ideas, it's clearly very correct, and says everything it needs to say, but at the same time, it's almost completely unintelligible in the Advice sense. So keep it in mind, and look for what I'm saying when things are beautiful. I promise this idea is worth the effort. If you want another perspective, read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize lecture. It's not the same idea — he means it a lot more literally than I do — but it'll help.

Disagree with me at [email protected] or lawliet5968 on discord!