What is the value of art? How does art bring us closer to the human ideal? This question has plagued me for a long time. Since we need to know what we are looking for in order to find it (what we are looking for; awkward, I know), knowing what art can give us should guide the search for important art, with better results.
Art can be entertainment. A great movie can be amazingly enjoyable and spark much discussion among friends. However, though art may be valuable in this way, the benefit is rather shallow. If I ask someone what is the value of sports, he may reply that sports are fun entertainment. However, he would be missing the real value of athleticism: improving health, mastering body, and pressing ourselves to various limits. Thus, if we guide ourselves by looking for the art that is most fun, we may get poor results. We can then appropriately reword as: how does art enhance one’s character?
I think that the issue gets murky because of the elitism among those who study art. I will admit that on some levels I have been tempted by the “I’m better than you, the unenlightened fool” attitude held by some artists. Knowing something for the sake of knowing it is foolish.
Art can be beautiful, and make us better in the process. I know personally when I am in beautiful surroundings I tend to think well. When I am in ugly, sad surroundings, it is very hard for me to concentrate.
Art can also be used as a creative medium for individuals. Many people feel the need to create art and to express their thoughts. I’ve read about how therapeutic this can be, and I feel that this is very useful.
The highest value of art is its ability to both show and hide something at the same time. I few semesters ago, I took a class titled Vampire: Blood and Empire. One of the class points was that Vampires as a mythology both expose certain human desires and hide them behind the curtain of a monster, and that this is the habit of any good art.
Thus art will stir up thoughts that we would not normally think and to see truths that we would not normally see. An excellent example of this is The Lord of the Flies. Golding effectively shows us various elements of the nature of society, and thus sparks much thought on the subject that may not normally have been thought about.
One of the more important consequences of this reasoning is that art is essentially irrelevant. There are books that already consider these same subjects. For those people who are able to objectively reason about themselves, their lives, the lives of others, their beliefs, and their environments, non-fiction may be a much better choice.
Let me give my own example: In Les Miserables, Hugo uses the context of revolution-era France to show a great number of human evils. This book sparked my great interest in society, people, politics, and the ideal. Other, non-fiction books may actually discuss these things, but I would never have read them. However, now it is more worthwhile for me to read books that actually consider these important subjects, unadulterated by the constraints of plot and believability.
Using these, we can say that art can be more or less useful to various people. If you are already searching for good and ideal, then it may only be useful as entertainment or as a means of creative expression. However, to those who still aren’t ready to look at themselves on a detached, analytical level, art may be very useful as a “stepping stone” toward enlightenment.
