What’s Art Got To Do With It?
Art is a Must-Have that Pushes, Creates, and Reflects Society
Elasticità by Umberto Boccioni; Oil on Canvas 1912. Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC
Art is central to our lives, to culture, to health and to happiness for individuals and entire societies. Art is central to what it is to be human. Art is central to comfort in our own skin, and to who we are as a people.
Art encompasses visual arts and performing arts. Visual art is something one can touch. It is physically present. There’s no physical contact with performing art. Performing art unfolds over time. You can touch a singer but you can’t touch music. You can touch a dancer but you can’t touch dance.
What bottom-line is art? Art is communication — a universal method beyond language by which people across time, custom, and geographical location express and share. Art is a connector, an agitator, a question-asker. Art is commentary, and can be welcoming, repelling, touching, motivating, maddening, harsh, or calming. Art can be truth-telling, or it can be manipulative propaganda.
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by Umberto Boccioni; Photo courtesy of Museum of Modern Art NYC
Art Makes and Changes Society
Art simultaneously pushes, creates, and reflects culture and society. Periods and movements in art push societal change, and reflect where we’ve been and where we’re headed. In the early 20th century, Italian Futurists both represented and shaped global industrialization and urbanization trends. How so? Through art that emphasized speed, density, technology, energy, violence, progress, melding cultures, and change, the Futurist movement made it possible for individuals to experience aspects of real-time global trends personally, independent of their politics, income, religion, or location in the world.
Art spurs-on and reflects social change. Art influences philosophical and political thought. Art facilitates connection between people, trends, customs, and time periods. Art portrays triumphs and atrocities, war, love, birth, death, revelry, national pride, longing, loneliness, beauty, horror, pain, delight, and our most fundamental sense of self. Art predicts, art clarifies, and art documents our world and what and who are in it.
Can our bodies physically function without art? Yes.
Bodily function can proceed without art. We can physically survive without art, but live? Can we live without art? Not just survive but live? That’s another question. Most would agree that we are here to do more than merely survive.
Image by David Hofmann from Unsplash
From the earliest human-like beings about which we are aware, we have arranged our belongings. We have included ornamentation in our living spaces that were not necessary for physical survival.
Cave and bone etchings dating from the Neanderthal period show representational art on walls in family dwellings, and evidence across time demonstrates that we have arranged furniture, decorated walls, commemorated events large and small via art and music, and have adorned and styled our bodies by parting our hair, wearing matching garments (gloves and socks) on our limbs, and wearing jewelry, from earliest recorded human history.
Imagine a world without music. Imagine a world without poetry or photography or dance. Could we physically survive in a world without art? Yes, we could survive but we likely would not care to do so. We’re more than survivors. We’re creators. We dabble and build and do. We flourish and thrive. We are artists. We find a way to express and make and have.
What’s art got to do with life and the world and us? Evidently everything.