Is art good for anything?

[black_son_of_gray]

Is art good for anything?
[...]

If I were a farmer, a breeder, a producer, at this point I'd be tired, but at least I could say: "My milk is good for something. It fed so many children today.", or "I've produced so many eggs and so many people will eat them." However, art is a product, just like bread and eggs, which can be consumed by many people, in various forms: a story, a drawing, a comic strip, etc etc...

But, if you ever been on the side of those who produce, sooner or later, you would ask yourself the question: I did something beautiful today, but was it useful??

[...]

I wonder what on earth they had answered to the question of why they would continue to make art, even if the product of their work was used for mere decorum, to infatuation people with religion, etc.

Then it comes the question time, but usually the question is the same: Who between a farmer and an artist obtains a product that is useful, for himself, for others, and for the earth too? Which one is doing the correct life? What is the use of art for an artist? How is art viewed?

ps: the speech is to be considered from an ERE point of view, in which a person of our age dedicates himself to art as a career, and obtains his daily food through this activity, therefore a real job, as a farmer, a doctor, a bricklayer, etc; and understand how art can be an added value.

I have very strong, book-length opinions on this. I'll try to keep it brief.

I think art is so important that the discussion of whether it is "useful" is essentially nonsense - tantamount to asking whether "being a human" is useful.

Here's how I go about thinking what art is: it is a product, a process, a quality. It is ancient and integral to being a human, maybe nature itself. Sounds like I'm overselling it. Read on.

I cannot stress enough how valuable it is to think of art as a process rather than merely a product. I'll give an example, and then restate it conceptually.

You're painting a portrait. What is the process? (Every painter has differences, but just as an example...) You prep a surface for paint. You prep the model (pose, lighting, etc.). You sketch the model's features/contours. You examine the scene, mix up some paints, and block out the main colors over your drawing. You mix in complementaries or whites to get shadow and highlight values, you add those on top. You look at what doesn't look quite right. You make adjustments. You add the fine details until you determine that adding any more paint won't add to the painting. You wait for it to dry, maybe varnish it, hang it up on the wall. Done.

That's what you are physically, technically doing. But what are you really doing? At each step in the process of painting a portrait, you are making a manipulation in the world (e.g. drawing a line, mixing a color) and then testing it against some criteria. Over and over again, that is what you are doing. That is the process of art.

You know what else is a process? Evolution is a process. That's where living organisms, through the messiness of imperfect reproduction, bring new manipulations (oops, offspring...) into the world, and the world is only too happy to test them against the harsh realities of life.

You know what else is a process? Science is a process. That's where you come up with an explanation, make a few manipulations (oops, experiments...) in the world, and then observe how well those manipulations line up with your explanation.

My argument here is that there is a type of process that shows up over an over again...something I would call iterative refinement. A constant testing and retesting of something against a criteria.

Art is such a process.

With evolution the criteria is "fitness"; with science the criteria is "invalidation of the hypothesis"; with art the criteria is...what? I would argue that with art, the criteria is something like: "Am I communicating my experience?" That could be emotions, that could be where your attention is, and so on. @jacob's reply makes good points.

For our portrait painter, maybe they are painting their friend - a friend with the kindest eyes, a friend that always gives the painter a feeling of cozy warmth. A safe place. And that's what they are feeling as they paint the portrait. So now how is the image framed on the canvas? How is the friend lit? What kind of color palette fits that feeling? What even is that feeling? How could the painter draw a viewer's gaze to the eyes, so they could see that same quality in the friend? These are the questions. These are the criteria by which the painter tests and retests her painting. (Or maybe it's a photographer trying to capture exactly what the mood was like at the wedding party, or maybe it's a ....)

It's of course worth pointing out how little society apparently thinks about art, even though art is as old as humans and is literally everywhere. To the extent that it's ever addressed in US schools (probably also true in other WEIRD countries?) it's rarely treated in a serious way beyond elementary school ages*. To study it in high school or college makes you the butt of derisive jokes from the most artistically stunted STEM dullards.

Here's part of why the art process matters so much: because it makes you take long, difficult looks into your "criteria". If you are to make a piece of art dealing with grief, it makes you examine deep in your bones what a particular grief means to you, then reach out with your basket of techniques and communicate that feeling to another human being. It helps you work through out all the nuances for all the emotions or events that happen in your life - by the way, not all of which are bad! (the comedian Demitri Martin has a book of humorous sketches called "If It's Not Funny It's Art", pointing out how we idiotically only think of art as "serious") Art as process has a lot in common with introspection, although one could argue that because it has a criteria and is iterative, it is more likely to be productive than aimless introspection.

Here's part of why the art process matters so much: it allows you to figure out what has meaning and what matters to you - to learn that about yourself. Which is huge, of course, for just y'know living a good life. But that knowledge then forms the basis for how you construct your own systems, your web of goals. You know, ERE Wheaton Level 7 stuff. It's how you can approach the question of "What's it all for?"

Here's part of why the art process matters so much: because reasoning/logic is only a small part of what your brain can do. Doing visual arts makes you look at the world in very different ways, looking at contours, light/shadow, colors. It's not intuitive to many. It forces different states, attending to aspects of an object that aren't normally attended to. Same with music. Same with writing. You are forced into outside-the-box territory for a brief period of time, but the benefits to your brain extend far beyond that. Like physical exercise to the body, art to the brain**. And you do know that your ERE systems require creativity to create, right? And you do know that those ERE systems will need to creatively adapt and evolve over time, right? (They are processes, not products)

Art is not lesser than STEM, even though it is treated that way. Art is not lesser than farming, or bricklaying, or [your pick of manual trade]. They are cousins. They have the same type of process at their core, even if different criteria. They commingle. Anything that has a style has art embedded in it, suffused through it. That art enriches. It's not about "useful", it is intrinsic.

*If any of what I've written in this post is eye-opening or seems newly insightful to you, maybe consider the depth of your own art-related education. I know very little about art, but I know it has way more to offer than what I was exposed to during my education. I'm currently trying to make amends/emends to that deficit.

**And just like exercise, what you are doing matters. Are you just casually strolling? Are you just looking at pleasant pictures? Ok. But challenging yourself, at least somewhat regularly, will have greater impact.

[mountainFrugal]

I have very strong, book-length opinions on this. I'll try to keep it brief.

Same... . I agree with what @bsog and @jacob have said. I have stayed out of this thread purposefully...

I leave a quote instead:

What we say,
what we sing,
what we paint-
we get to choose.

We have no responsibility
to anything other than the art itself.
The art is the final word.

...

A work of art is not an end point in itself.
It's a station on a journey.
A chapter in our lives.
We acknowledge these transitions
by documenting each of them.

-- Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

[7Wannabe5]

@black-son-of-gray:

Bravo!

[DutchGirl]

I think a society is first struggling to stay alive. Have decent shelter, have food on the table, have water. Then we can also have artisans, people who specialise in making pottery or tools for farmers or metal tools to improve the basic survival processes like farming and building shelter. And once that is done, we can start expressing ourselves through art.

I do think that it's harder to know your value as an artist than as a farmer. The farmer knows that they contribute to people having food on the table. The artisan can point out how their tools make the basic work easier and more productive. The artist has to believe that the specific art that they create has value. And it may not. Or it may only be appreciated years later (example: Vincent van Gogh). But I do see that art in general is a very valuable component of life - once a basic level of safety and food security have been established.

[zbigi]

For historical context, it's worth mentioning that that elevation of art to its current status happened only in XIX century. Before that, visual arts was merely serving illustration purposes, illustrating higher values of the society (mostly religious motives, good deeds of the highborn people etc.). Artists, even most brilliant ones (Leonardo etc.), were merely artisans, not worthy the life of one noble man or bishop.
But, as in XIX century the elites have moved away from religion, a spiritual void was created, which was subsequently filled with art as the new medium for metaphysics, and artists as the new priests. Of course, art couldn't ultimately bear so much load and this idea collapsed sometime during the XX century, but elevated status of art and artists still has some momentum in Western societies - the fact that states and rich philantropists, without giving it a second though, fund expensive museum and artists' residences are proofs of that.

Edit: Oh, and BTW, the giant explosion of popularity of painting and multiplication of painters in XIX and XX century were obviously a n-th order effect of the above. Since art got elevated, being a successful artists meant you will be celebrated, which meant fame and money. Suddenly, large amounts of people saw being an artist as a viable career path. This resulted in e.g. plenty of Americans moving to WWI-impoverished France to paint (as their dollars went a long way there), so much so that there were entire sizable villages of American wannabe-artists. As with everything, this market quickly got saturated, and, especially with the advent of no-skill modern art, the dream of "making it" through hard work at art is now gone (as nowadays anyone can make art, so standing out is mostly about the connections you have).

[7Wannabe5]

Well, it’s pretty self-evident that art couldn’t become a viable profession until there existed a context in which having a “profession” made sense. However, it is still the case that since time immemorial, our species has made use of valuable life energy to creatively adorn themselves, their artifacts, and their dwelling places. Obviously, if you consider the matter even across species, it is likely related to sexual selection, which is often a stronger driver of evolution than raw survival. Humans make machines so that they can be strong as bull elephants, and humans make art and music so that they can be sexy as peacocks and bull frogs.

Also, there is a good deal of overlap of our sexual, emotional, and survival fields in some realms such as garden design. We find flowers beautiful for the same reason bees find them useful. Red contrasts boldly with green, because we co-evolved with the fruit that wants to be eaten by us. Sitting on a bench gazing at a landscape or a landscape painting can make us feel calm and content, because our natural environment was savannah with structure at our back. Etc etc etc

[jacob]

It's of course worth pointing out how little society apparently thinks about art, even though art is as old as humans and is literally everywhere. To the extent that it's ever addressed in US schools (probably also true in other WEIRD countries?) it's rarely treated in a serious way beyond elementary school ages*. To study it in high school or college makes you the butt of derisive jokes from the most artistically stunted STEM dullards.

I'll confess that I did not adopt my current stance on art above until about 5 years ago when something finally clicked no thanks to the Danish school system which could be well-described as DERP (Dialectic, Egalitarian, Repetitive, Postmodern). Despite spending most of the time from grade 4 to 12 on fiction/art/... analysis, there was no serious treatment beyond elementary school level with endless class discussions about "How does this [piece of art] make you feel?" and "What's your guess about what the artist is trying to say here?"

I (much) later realized that the actual/meta goal was to install the habits of textual analysis and conversation as a matter of resolving differences and reaching consensus. However, this was the water the fish (even the teachers) swam in ... or rather flopped around in. In my case the disdain came about because there seemed to be no art to art and no explicit method to the analysis beyond making stuff up. The attitude was that anyone could make art and that understanding art was entirely subjective. As such classroom discussions from my teenage perspective seemed entirely based on people's willingness to BS and how much effort they put into doing so. No conclusions were drawn. Naturally, this wasn't very compatible with my temperament. I was definitely a STEM dullard looking for some kind of theory/framework to make sense of where all these classroom conversations were going yet never finding one.

An example of how seriously (or not seriously) the school system took art, we even had two semesters of mandatory music and art classes in HS where we too "made art". Basically a humiliating shitshow that continued the finger painting and sing-a-longs from we were left it back in 3rd grade (there were classes back then too). I made a pig-like object out of clay and painted it neon green for which I got a B+ (the entire class got the same grade).

In the senior year of HS I finally blew up---or rather the teacher directly asked us what we were hoping to get out of her class and I responded---in a conversation that went along the lines of:
Q: "How come we're endlessly analyzing authors and artists ... we've been doing this over and over since we learned to read more than a decade ago?"
A: "Well, it's a way for us to learn about society and what people thought about it."
Q: "I read many author biographies over the years and it seems that most of these guys had [severe] psychological issues, so are they really the best source material to understand society?!"
A: "It's what we have."
Also...
Q: "We're only ever writing essays and the occasional poem. How come we're not taught to write a reports, letters, articles, ... like a journalist. I mean the odds of writing an essay being useful after graduation is pretty low?!?"
A: [later provided a very helpful booklist for self-education]

If education is what is left after forgetting everything learned in school, the educational result was that I avoided anything to do with art decades after graduating. This is probably how a lot of people feel about algebra. I still skip over poems in books the same way people skip over equations.

However, I realize that this is difficult to teach and I don't even have a real answer for a good strategy [w/o blowback]. Students aged 10 to 18 are in almost all cases emotionally and socially immature^H^H^H^Hstill developing compared to the art they/we were talking about. In STEM, 10 year olds aren't subjected to tensor algebra but rather given some 7*45=? arithmetic appropriate to their level incrementally building up their skills. Whereas in DERP, the general attitude is that anyone can comment on anything, and so 14 year olds are made to write 800 words about The Scream or some romantic poem despite being 100x more focused on soccer and video games than social alienation or lost love. There has to be a better way than sussing out what one believes the teacher wants to hear via conversation.

In any case, I guess I finally managed to---if not appreciate art---then at least acknowledge its use even if it took me over 40 years to get there.

PS: I did enjoy your description of art as a process similar to science. Non-scientists often see the scientific process as rather mechanical. The scientific method itself is described in a step-wise fashion even though this is not how the process works in reality where it is a creative process of refinement subject to rejection. Conversely, having never been presented with an "artistic method", I did for a long time conclude that art was entirely random and as such not much different from making noise. The intersubjective framework at least rooted art in some purpose. Indeed, it's not like I don't see beauty or have an emotional response to [the process] or a connection but I'm far more likely to find it in the design of an airplane, say, than in a painting of some artist's mental state.

[zbigi]

I think it's probably a mistake to get children and teenagers to read literature on the deepest and most fundamental aspects of being a human. This is especially true in our times, where children/teens are cloistered and are living a life devoid of any objective problems. 100 years ago, children could have had e.g. sibilings die of polio or tuberculosis, which would have matured them somewhat and made them more receptive to say The Book of Job (which we were reading in school as 15 year olds). Whereas, a modern teenagers' biggest feeling of loss is perhaps getting his latest Playstation a couple months later than the other guys in school. A book about loss, perserverance, cruelty of fate is as alien to them as Mayan poetry.

Even worse than that, reading tons of XIX century romantic poetry in school, a lot of it centered around the polish independence movement, felt like a gigantic waste of time. This, however, I think has the extra hidden goal of instilling patriotism in people, which is especially true in a nation that is constantly in danger from abroad.

BTW ancedotally, from what I've heard, the Ukrainian people have gotten fairly cosmopolitan and cynical in the past couple of decades (which is no surprise, given their past as a part of the Soviet Union - hard to not get ultra cynical after living through that), and so, after the 2014 Russian invasion, Ukraininan goverment made a huge push towards cramming patriotism down children's throats. The results are pretty good, as in 2022, during the second Russian invasion, the young generation is significantly more willing to fight the enemy.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

I noted that you pointed the finger at your school system, but did not mention your exposure to art as a child in your home. As with most things, this is usually the biggest influence. There are all sorts of works and practices of art that are appropriately approachable for children of any age. For example, classic picture books do provide visual art, literature, and poetry at appropriate levels. Puppet shows, children’s theater, dance lessons, children’s museums, etc.

For most of my life, I lived with somebody (my sister or my first husband) who was a gifted musical composer, and I recently had the thought that it’s such a rare gift to have a unique background track attached to many of your memories.

[jacob]

I noted that you pointed the finger at your school system, but did not mention your exposure to art as a child in your home. As with most things, this is usually the biggest influence. There are all sorts of works and practices of art that are appropriately approachable for children of any age. For example, classic picture books do provide visual art, literature, and poetry at appropriate levels. Puppet shows, children’s theater, dance lessons, children’s museums, etc.

That's a very astute observation and a very good point. In terms of finger-pointing, the [Danish] school system has pretty much claimed the entire territory of forming the younglings. It would be rather frowned upon if parents were to teach anything beyond what's "taught in school". Since the collective default orientation is far stronger than in the US, this is not considered an issue.

It's fair to say I had no exposure to art via the home that I remember. There was as little interest in such things as there was in reading (see viewtopic.php?p=275058#p275058 ). The main value-vector was work-is-its-own-reward and a life-long interest in being actively involved with sports (my mother almost made the national team and later coached "little league" for many years). Both values ended up being reflected in me. In terms of work, I obviously did the opposite. In terms of sports, it's hard for me to accept life without being physically active. Whereas arts and sciences were supported but left to our own devices. It's likely temperamental (NT-type) that I ended up in the direction of thinky-thinks rather than feely-feels. Whereas my sister (SP-type) ended up as a world-traveler until she settled down. She's also without art-interests as far as I know.

The people I know who leans artsy tend to be NF but I don't know if that's innate or inherited from home. Interestingly MIL is sufficiently skilled that she has actually sold paintings. But I think for her it's more of a craft than a way of expressing something. I think this difference also applies to the STEM-creatives ... for some it's just pushing equations around ... for others it's an involution of truth.

[chenda]

Even worse than that, reading tons of XIX century romantic poetry in school, a lot of it centered around the polish independence movement, felt like a gigantic waste of time. This, however, I think has the extra hidden goal of instilling patriotism in people, which is especially true in a nation that is constantly in danger from abroad.

Yes this was everywhere in 19th century Europe. Minority nations ruled by other nations seeking to creating a nationalist consciousness by promoting a somewhat reimagined - and often rather sentimental - vision of the past. The Celtic Revival and Viking Revivial are two examples of this. From what I understand, Russian and Ukrainian identity in practice has tended to blur to some extent, which has probably increased the imperative for Ukraine to culturally delineate themselves from Russia.

[black_son_of_gray]

Perhaps it's worthwhile to suss out what we are calling "art".

In my post above, I used portrait painting as an example because that was in the OP post. I have a broad definition. I'm not exaggerating when I say "art is as old as humans and is literally everywhere" and "anything that has a style has art embedded in it".

Just a few examples of what I would call "art" or "art"-infused:

Petra
Zellij / Mosaics unearthed in Pompeii
African tribal drumming and dance
All ceremonial dress/constuming since basically forever
Edda
Singing
Storytelling/Spoken word
The Sphinx, Mayan pyramids, The Pantheon, Hagia Sophia
The Lascaux wall paintings
Japanese Kimono
Shrines from just about every culture
Angkor Wat
The tattoos on Ötzi
Sarcophagi
Calligraphy
This bronze sword currently making rounds on the Internet - look at that hilt!
Makeup

And on and on... I thought up that list in no more than 2 minutes.

Related point 1: Everyone who has ever boogied to a catchy song, told a killer joke that brought down the house, or carved a spoon out of a hunk of wood (e.g. sloyd) has encountered art head-on. Art and the process of making it is abundantly available at all times to just about everyone. I don't personally think it is contingent on Maslow's Heirarchy, or affluence, or technological sophistication in any strong way. The Maasai are absolutely drenched in art!

Related point 2: Most people on the planet are what the West call "people of color". Isn't it interesting how rarely the art of people of color is even considered "art" in the West? I mean if it isn't a Renaissance painter, Shakespeare, Bach/Beethoven/Mozart, etc., how could it possibly be art?? Isn't that when art began historically? Or did it begin with the Romans/Greeks? Surely, that is when art historically began.

This should tell us something about how criminally bad "art education" is in the West. We don't recognize it when it is right in front of our faces (it isn't called art). We don't recognize it as a process (it isn't taught that way). We don't think its implementation/incorporation is "practical" (practical examples aren't shown to us). We only think of it as being very specific products that have been put in a box labeled "art" by narrow-minded people from a tiny region on the earth, long since dead. The lack of perspective is astounding, but here we are.

[black_son_of_gray]

@jacob

I can certainly relate to finding a deeper appreciation of art late. I too was a STEM dullard for far too long.

As others have noted as well, there is a mismatch between the sophistication of art we expose to children, their maturity/developmental capacity in relation to that art, and their technical skill-sets*. I don't know how to resolve this, although there could clearly be some improvements.

Some lessons I have learned only through hindsight:

My greatest exposure to art growing up (outside of reading a lot of fiction) was through music. I played in the school band for many years, up until college. The first art-related problem began as soon as I picked up the instrument, and that is the technical problem - it takes a long time to learn even basic skills to proficiency, much less expression. Like, it took me years. On top of learning the instrument (i.e. how to play all the notes, how to make those notes actually sound good, etc.), I had to learn music as well (i.e. how music is written/notated, key signatures, etc.). It was often frustrating. It was often boring. It was only after years that I could play pieces that 1) I liked, and 2) in such a way, and with such a personal
style/interpretation, that it could be called expressive. By then end, I was able to play gigs semi-professionally, and that was considerably more fun, expressive, and "artistic".

Related Point 1: I moved to a new school at one point, and because this new school had already had auditions/placements into the higher-level band (big school, multiple bands), it looked like I was going to be stuck twiddling my thumbs mindlessly for a whole year playing rinky-dink music again. But! As it turned out, this low-level band didn't have anyone to play a different instrument (a pretty important one for the band, actually), and it was suggested that maybe I could try to pick that one up to help out the band and also keep my thumbs from twiddling? So I took up that instrument. Importantly, I wasn't starting over completely because while I didn't know how to play that instrument, I was by that time quite experienced with all the other aspects of music (how to read it, how to breathe, how to keep rhythm, match pitch with others, how to practice effectively, etc.). End result: in about 1 year, I made incredibly quick progress and was at the same level of performance as my first instrument. It was also a much more enjoyable journey. The following year, I could have placed in the most advanced band with either instrument. Lesson: skills bootstrap and compound.

Related Point 2: Even with solid technical proficiency, playing in a jazz band rocked my world. I cannot describe the terror/disappointment that gripped me the first time I was standing in front of an audience in a jazz club halfway across the city at 10pm on a school night with 12 bars of solo to just make up on the spot. Technically, I was a good player, but what came out was 12 bars of painful suckage. There are three other times in my life I can think of where I've seen such visceral reaction (in others or myself). 1) High school physics exams 2) Organic chemistry in college 3) young PhD grad students with amazing undergraduate grades but never had to apply their knowledge to a novel situation (ahem, come up with and then execute a bench experiment). Lesson: creative, contextual application of technical skills is itself a skill. A rare one, in part because it's a skill that can really only be learned after learning the technical skills....

As a roughshod attempt at defining the problem, art education kind of manifests early on as a series of related, trilemma-ish tradeoffs between:

Skills Development
Self-expression
Enjoyment

Self-expression without technical skill is not enjoyable. Embarrassment at having a well-developed, sophisticated, and nuanced expressive drive and then only producing something that looks childish because of woefully inadequate technical skill development will certainly kill enjoyment and the motivation to develop those skills. It's too easy to just say "I just don't have talent" as an excuse. Unfortunately, the sophistication of self-expression comes only with maturity/development/experience, which often manifests only (much) later in life, when technical skill development is often more challenging (and therefore more frustrating). Skill development is not enjoyable when what you really want to do is self-expression. (Or e.g. needing to spend considerable time on still life or color theory if you want to paint portraits, or e.g. learning grammar/syntax when you want to write novels) Without a specific end-goal in mind, you're unlikely to see the point in basic skill development. Furthermore, the skill of combining and applying the technical skills you already have to the particular art challenge in front of you is probably also not enjoyable to develop.

Skill development, self-expression, and enjoyment rise and fall together. Improvements in any of these help to bootstrap the others. Decay in any one of these will decay the others.

For what it's worth, it has been incredibly helpful for me to simply know and accept deep down that sucking is part of the process early on. A huge fraction of people are sucking-intolerant. They simply will not allow themselves the grace to be bad at something for any real amount of time. Certainly not publicly bad. This is unfortunately common in people who are actually technically skilled at something in particular. It's a real problem. Sucking isn't evidence that the process isn't working, it is the process. Again, going back to thinking of art as an iterative process with a criteria**, there isn't anything to revise and iterate if the first draft comes out perfect. And it never does. But only final drafts are taught or paraded around others, never first, or second, or twentieth drafts...

So when it comes to art, which is poorly taught (if at all) and underappreciated broadly (which could be read as large deficits broadly in both technical skill and enjoyment - I'll leave it to you to decide whether the general population is skilled in self-expression...), everyone is pretty much destined will suck for a long time, and is therefore likely to quit and rationalize either that 1) it's not important/"useful" and 2) "I guess I just don't have the talent/gift" long before they find out if either is actually true.

*I can remember assignments like this: English class full of hyperactive 13 year olds assigned to read a Shakespearean sonnet like Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?") where every tenth word or phrase needed to be looked up or explained, then the kids have to create their own sonnet about love, then the evaluation is based entirely on whether the kid could achieve iambic pentameter and a cohesive rhyming scheme. Bonus points were possible if the next day you could stand up in front of the class at rattle off the sonnet from memory (seriously!) What has been taught other than that poetry is boring, confusing drudgery?

**We could try to go one more level abstract and look at the tradeoff relationships for the general "iterative refinement" process that I would argue is behind science, evolution, art, etc. It's kinda blowing my mind right now, though, so I'll leave that to the reader.

[black_son_of_gray]

I think it's probably a mistake to get children and teenagers to read literature on the deepest and most fundamental aspects of being a human. This is especially true in our times, where children/teens are cloistered and are living a life devoid of any objective problems. 100 years ago, children could have had e.g. sibilings die of polio or tuberculosis, which would have matured them somewhat and made them more receptive to say The Book of Job (which we were reading in school as 15 year olds). Whereas, a modern teenagers' biggest feeling of loss is perhaps getting his latest Playstation a couple months later than the other guys in school. A book about loss, perserverance, cruelty of fate is as alien to them as Mayan poetry.

This strikes me as incredibly ungenerous to young people today and sounds to my ear like it might be coming from someone lacking in appreciation of "the deepest and most fundamental aspects of being a human."

[Walwen]

The biggest issue in my teenage-hood (which wasn't long ago- I'm only 20) was probably finding my sense of self and dealing with going into the adult world not feeling like I had a fair lot at life, coming to terms with having seemingly inmountable obstacles in my way, and realizing that my parents/family weren't there for me/I had to become independent and had no one to rely on.

My favorite book, that I read at 17 of my own volition, is Of Human Bondage, which is not kinky but about how we bond to other people, following a man from the cradle to his late 30s, as he rebels against his parents, changes careers, goes through several relationships, is abused, changes his ideologies, etc.

I get what you mean- people aren't dropping left and right from the plague. Also realize that a lot of the death in previous generations was infant mortality. I don't have the stats here, but it was definitely more like <5yos dying left and right, not 16 year olds.

I'd say the most common "objective problems" of teenagers were mental-health related (losing their first job, friends/boyfriend or being unable to get driver's license due to uncontrolled, life-style induced anxiety issues), parents getting divorced (very common), and money- realizing that they can't afford to move out like their parents, that they don't know how to go to college without massive debt, having no idea how they'll ever afford to have kids, etc. Mental health is on the decline for my generation, and it's about more than just higher recognition/more diagnosis.

If that doesn't do it, there was this giant world-wide event that happened a few years ago, when I was a teen... something to do with a virus, I dunno. Sounds like an "objective problem."



To be on the topic of the thread, I think I might have another perspective.

We could all live in concrete and drywall bunkers, you know. We could build all the stores and workplaces to look like that, too. But I think that would be, you know, a bit dystopian looking.

I'm currently knitting myself a blanket. I could easily buy a blanket from Walmart for 1/10th the cost. But instead, I'm making a blanket in the color I want, using extrafine merino wool from the italian brand Berroco. I won't be able to chuck it in the washer- I'll have to baby it its entire life. It's going to take me like 75 hours to complete. No one (yet) has looked at the blanket and said "you're a total fool for making this blanket when you can buy cheap blankets from the store."
Everyone has said it is beautiful, soft, and they want one. You can say, "oh but a blanket has a use" well I already own enough blankets. I'm really only doing this for the artistic, aesthetic appeal.

It is human to want to be aesthetic. Pretty stones, shiny object- those are basic desires, but it goes above that.

I walked into a cupcake shop, and they had plastic houseplants, but they were of such good quality and set up in a way that you couldn't tell unless you looked close. The lighting was just perfect. The colors, the layout of the store really drew you towards those cupcake displays. Walmarts use annoying bright lights and have no clocks to get you to shop more: that's one sort of aesthetic, but it's nothing to be proud of from a human perspective. But to design the perfectly inviting cupcake shop? Or cozy yet productive coffeeshop? Not to mention a home office that you enjoy spending time in while working? These are meaningful human pursuits.

Some people are happy in minimalist, empty rooms with just a plastic desk and plastic chair to work on their laptops, then go to sleep on the literal floor. I would go crazy. I own plants- and put the plants in pretty pots (some of them are just pretty coffee cans or old mason jars!).


If you own a business and need to decorate the large lobby, it makes sense to purchase wall art. Wall art is both an asset in itself (it doesn't get worn out like the pleather chairs will) and is a part of having a complete lobby. It makes sense to spend a few hundred on it. A large canvas alone might cost 40 bucks... or more.

What about commemorating and memorializing local areas (the wildlife and forests are threatened nowadays), not to mention people (we all die), and not to mention abstract feelings?

I think a career in art is more meaningful than a career in, say, retail, selling plastic doohickeys, or being an amazon reseller, or being in a call center. Not because it's more "fun" but because you literally work with more meaningful concepts. The artist that painted watercolors of local historic buildings? They made something. You can't paint those twenty years from now- the buildings will be different then. The photographer who shot the fall leaves? It won't look that way ever again. If I wanted to commission a knitted blanket like the one I'm making myself, it would probably cost 400-800 dollars. I mean the materials were 120 and it's taking me 75 hours to make, do the math. Not many people make their livings off knitting because the demand is so low in the face of machine-made fabric, but if you want that level of quality and customization.... you're gonna pay for it.

There's art everywhere you look. Like, art that people paid money for. It's more than just nana's crockery animals or porcelain collection. We use art to celebrate important occasions- birthday cards, flower arrangements for mother's day, easter baskets, not to mention Christmas decor. We use art to have a sense of rhythm in life: my house has a set of 12 seasonal/monthly door hanging decorations, that my grandfather made in a woodshop class decades ago. We use art to focus our thoughts and to greater understand concepts- motivational workplace posters, anyone? Or art in general that makes you feel good? Every semester a GIANT tent pops up to sell wall posters to the college kids: lots of anime and tv show posters, motivational posters, and lots and lots of classic paintings. And the line went around the block- seemed like it was pretty important for everyone to have some art in their dorm room.


Art's more than Shakespeare sonnets and high-brow stuff. I mean even in his day Shakespeare's plays weren't exactly high-brow stuff. Art is an important part of creating enjoyable human environments. At home, workplaces, offices, stores, art is there. Art is entertainment- art is decoration- art is part of the environment- art is part of life.

That's how I think about it. I'm trying to get into local galleries to sell art.


TLDR: Art is everywhere, people spend a lot of money on it, and it's meaningful and a basic human desire.

[zbigi]

This strikes me as incredibly ungenerous to young people today and sounds to my ear like it might be coming from someone lacking in appreciation of "the deepest and most fundamental aspects of being a human."

Of course, there are many children/teens in developed countries who have it rough (e.g. because of having addicted or otherwise heavily dysfunctional partents etc.), but is my characterisation of a median child/teen living a cloistered life not true? If so, how? I'm also writing from experience, as I was such a cloistered child myself - perhaps to lesser degree than today's youngs (when I was nine, I was taking a city bus daily to go to the other end of the city to go to school there - something that I suspect parents could go to jail for nowadays in some places), but still - I remember getting a slightly worse graphics card than I wanted being a major disappointment for me when I was 17. THAT was the major disappointment, not say not getting to go high school and having to start working at 15 (the story of my mother).

[Walwen]

Having access to the internet at all was a month-to-month luxury that sometimes just wasn't in the budget my entire childhood, and the only reason I had a computer at all was because the school provided one. I detasseled corn, walking up to 20 miles a day in the summer, as a teen- and at 18 I was the oldest teen there. The boss stood on the back of his truck and demonstrated how to properly bend over the 8ft corn for the short kids- there were 13 year olds who were still a bit prepubescent. I'd say 15 was the most common age. By 19, if that counts, I was taking two buses every morning to get to work at 8AM.

This is coming from a household where my mother is a tenured professor with a good salary. The middle class is shrinking: the "median child/teen" has dysfunction in their lives. Maybe you were just a late bloomer/had a cloistered upbringing. I do remember kids whining about not getting the newest iPhone or video game console or whatever. I would call them stupid, but I'm here on an ERE forum, so there's some selection bias at play.... Suicide, heroin, and the pandemic were issues in my friend's lives back in middle and high school and I worried about that a lot more, my own life aside.

TLDR: I'm not sure that a graphics card being the biggest disappointment in your teenagehood is a way to judge teenagehood in general. Some teens are cloistered but I'm not sure it's on the rise.....

However I will say I do think the infantilization of the population in generation is on the rise, which in turn leads to the rise in mental disorders in my generation. Basically, the idea is that certain ideologies are basically the inverse of cognitive behavioral therapy: teaching people that they are their feelings, to act emotionally and irrationally, that we are our thoughts, and to believe many cognitive distortions. It's a whole different can of worms, but this article covers the basics. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/me ... eral-girls I'll probably make a new thread if this is interesting to anyone as it's not really on topic lol.

[7Wannabe5]

Sucking isn't evidence that the process isn't working, it is the process.

Yes, and it is the banner cry of the punk art movement.

English class full of hyperactive 13 year olds assigned to read a Shakespearean sonnet like Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?") where every tenth word or phrase needed to be looked up or explained

If you think Shakespearean English is difficult, try reading anything written in the common tongue of that era. Shakespeare is taught, because Shakespeare was huge. Most modern speakers of English will unknowingly quote or reference Shakespeare an average of once a week. For instance, the phrase "into thin air" and he invented over 1000 words such as "lonely" and "bandit" that are still regularly used in speech and writing. However, you are correct in noting that the manner in which he is taught is semi-ridiculous. For reasons having to do with scheduling, I was placed with the average rather than the advanced group for 11th grade English, and I ended up being the designated reader aloud of Shakespeare for the entire class, because I was the only student who could do it fluently. Because Shakespeare was so influential on the subsequent development of the languge, if/once you achieve approximately 40,000 word vocabulary in modern English, reading Shakespeare cold is not that difficult.

If I was given the assignment of interesting young people in Shakespeare, I would assign a recent well-written young adult novel and/or graphic novel based on a classic theme invented or explored by Shakespeare, and then have the kids watch a movie version of the related play (Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" because beautiful or the 1935 "Midsummer Nights Dream" with Mickey Rooney as Puck, because hilarious) and/or Looney Tunes and/or episodes of Giligan's Island based on plays. Then I might spend a day or two exploring snatches of the original plays with the kids and discussing the clothing, customs, and social structure of the Elizabethan era.

[lillo9546]

I have very strong, book-length opinions on this. I'll try to keep it brief.

...

Thanks you so much for this interesting words.
I can perfectly relate with what you've said.
Expecially when you talk about "friends portraits" thing. That is something i felt. For example, I've done portraits drawing in the past.


In my current POV I'm personally not in the state to evaluate how i could live doing art. I always think about doing something locally for my city, or buy a house and turn that in an "art inn". Idk.

Anyway I'd like to know more about your POV on art, but with todays AI introduction.
If you think about How much effort and time would art process take, and all that emotions, feelings you have in the meanwhile, AI would take that and just generate an image in a click. This makes me really think on the invention of the camera, and how the society has transitioned from "drawings" to "illustrations" to "photographs" and now to "generated illustrations (AI)"

[guitarplayer]

This reminds me of what Kolakowski said about mysticism (in free translation)

Although mysticism is neither philosophy nor theology, it is not a doctrine but an experience (and if it is expressed in word a description of an experience) in which mystic meets god, nevertheless there is an area where experience and philosophy, it can be said, speak to each other. Mystic knows about god something that philosopher does not know. But when a mystic looks for words to express this knowledge, they become, even if unwillingly, a philosopher; though such philosopher for whom most frequently the rules of common sense and logic fail, and who feels compelled to bypass and abandon those rules so as to speak about this that cannot be spoken about.

I think art is good for the same.

With this said, look forward to the first in 14 years solo exhibition of Banksy at my local art gallery.