What Good Are the Arts?

In What Good Are The Arts, John Carey asked lots of pertinent questions such as whether art makes us human race better, is art a religion, what is good art, and what is the use of art?

They are highly provocative questions and ones that can not be discarded or ignored for anyone who wants to pursue and find meanings and fulfillments in the arts.

The truth is that there is no absolute truth in the art and there is no absolute good or bad arts. It’s a highly subjective, ambiguous, liberating but can be also a highly disorienting world. If one’s purpose is to find meaning in art, then I feel art is a wrong choice.

We are who we are and as good as we can be, with or without art. I feel the anchor, built based on values and principles, are endearing must-haves to enter into the art world so as not to be swayed and distracted as easily as a lost bird in the immense canopy of sky.

In Goldsmith: But is It Art BBC documentary, a group of young MFA art graduates were interviewed up to their graduation show and the short period after their graduation. It recorded for me the fundamental fascination of being an artist and a life in the arts: that constant questioning, evaluating, looking,critiquing, that no matter what the result is attitude,and to show that attitude matters despite the reality of life.

There was enormous energy in that program, one that can get into the psyche of many things, one that generate torrents of provoking questions of being an artist: what is an artist if it is not to raise questions, for oneself and for those who care to stop and look?

The concept of art and aesthetics has not always been present until around the 17th century, until then art was for everybody and there was no archway that defines who were artists and who were not. With Kant and his aesthetics theory, moral value was introduced into the arts, but then abstractions made a turning point that turned paintings from being representational to everything but representational, then the modern art era came, then the contemporary art.

Today anything, everything can be art, if someone calls it art, be it sometimes a piece of art existing under that name only for one person. So the fundamental question comes what the purpose of an art education is if anything can be art and anyone can be an artist.

When I watched Goldsmith: But is It Art program, the artists in the program posed the same questions themselves. As I went through the journey of those artists producing work that may or may not sell, what I saw was the intensity of looking, questioning things, the relations of things, concepts, existing perceptions, norms and assumptions. I guess what more does art need to do than that?

So I think as an artist today, that is what’s important, that is why art education is required, sought and will continue to be sought after. It’s a way of navigating the world, through the tools bestowed in a nurturing environment. What an artist produces and how an artist produce is less important than the necessity and the core anchor of never forgetting why you as an artist create. The journey of any artist from that sense is an everlasting pilgrimage of seeking for truth illuminated in the horizon; in the time of that journey, which often is a lifetime, discovery is made along the way so as to discover the roads others to trek upon later. It’s therefore an incredible rich life I feel.