I think that art is important in many ways. I will focus on visual arts because that is what I know the most about, but having spent time doing other art forms or reading books on creativity, similarities exist between all forms of creation.
Approximately 50% of our brains are devoted to the visual domain (directly or indirectly *). While we can design an environment that takes all the senses into account, the visual system is the one that dominates.
Drawing/painting, in particular, has a long human history. Writing is really just a newer invention that takes the symbols and shorthand of drawings and formalizes them for the sequential consumption of ideas that are usually spoken.
I think of the visual arts as taking objective data from the outside world or subjective data from your internal world and using the filter of your brain, which is a collection of experiences, personality, aptitudes, etc., to spit something back out the other side, iterating through it like @bsog stated. Drawing and painting are really ways of seeing. The more you do it, the more of the world you become aware of that you previously just ignored. This is true for details, color, lighting time of day, etc. In many ways, it makes general life much more interesting. The same holds true if you get good at identifying and expressing internal states/feelings/ideas/abstractions. You have more depth to be able to see the outside and inside world. This actually makes entertaining yourself for relatively cheap or spending 0 money an option for most of the time you are awake.
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
Just like practicing any skill, one can become quite skilled at being able to take in the data (internal/external) and output some sort of expression of that. This can range from drawing/painting a near-exact replica of a photo or existing work (requiring high skill + time) to a simple representation of someone's pose in a few lines. What is even more impressive is if you can create near-photorealistic images without a reference, but just using the accumulated reference images in your memory or creating something completely new from imagination. The same can be said for taking the mental image of an emotional state or abstract idea and being able to express that visually. An example of this was well put by @bsog, the example of getting the light/color just right to express how one sees someone else through a portrait. The better one is at these skills, the potentially higher the impact the art has on the artist and also the audience. If the artist is truly skilled, they will be able to move themselves and other artists in a similar discipline (other masters**). Multiple layers with near-limitless exploration potential. If the content is also popular, then the artist might also move laypeople with little time spent appreciating art.
With AI-generated art, it is likely that impressing other masters and the general public will happen at an increasing pace because the final "products" will be visually very good, but the artists themselves will remain relatively unmoved. Their filter is not engaged in the same way. This may change, of course, with more advanced AI, but art as a process is the name of the game, as stated by @bsog and me a few times in my journal. AI will not be able to move the artist in the same way for the foreseeable future.
All of this relates to ERE because often complex ideas are better expressed as images or a sequential set of images that gradually builds an argument/story/scientific discovery. This is especially true when trying to express something complex like a WOG (as noted by @bsog). A well-thought-out image or series of images has the ability to contain much denser information than writing can do on its own. This is why scientific papers usually weigh heavily on data visualizations***. The text is there to build an argument that is supported by the data, and vice versa. As an example, when I review scientific papers, I read the abstract, see the conclusion, and then go directly through the figures to see if the conclusion follows from the data. This will likely come more into play as various folks move up the WL scale. Maybe we will all eventually communicate in information dense images like the ones that @Daylen posts?
Part of my success in science is my ability to visualize concepts for papers, posters, grants, and talks. Interestingly, I learned more about how to give a good talk from reading Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" than I did from scientific talk YouTube. Sequencing information, simplifying it as much as possible for clarity without losing the truth, and thinking A LOT about the gutter space (space between panels or, in the case of talks, the phrases used between slide transitions). Non-scientists would be shocked at how bad 85% of scientific talks are. The content can be good, but the delivery (performance art) is terrible.
If we step out to storytelling in general, then we are even more aligned with the higher levels of ERE. We all have stories and narratives that we tell ourselves. If we want to self-author, we need to get really good at the art of storytelling. I do not mean telling ourselves fictions. I mean being able to take apart stories that we tell ourselves, analyze them for evidence, and then keep the pieces that are true. This is also called meta-cognition or thinking about thinking****. We can use our imagination to project ourselves into the future to figure out where we want to be or to explore critical aspects of our personality. This is all art mixed with a little analysis turned inward on ourselves.
* As humans, we only perceive a relatively small band of the electromagnetic spectrum with our visual system, and this is tuned to the environment we evolved in. What if we had the abilities of other creatures?
** Musashi - splitting the stem with his sword, only another master can truly appreciate it.
*** This would be different if the paper were more theoretical.
**** I am not suggesting all meta-cognition has to be narrative.
Suggested Reading:
- "Understanding Comics" - Scott McCloud
- "The Design Of Everyday Things" - Don Norman
- "The Creative Act: A Way of Being" - Rick Rubin