What Use is Art?
By FORREST ZENG ‘25
Apart from the various recreations a ninth grader might participate in while on Spring Break (e.g. eating, sleeping, and playing video games), I found myself visiting a local bookstore,Barnes & Nobles, one too many times. I frequently visited the philosophy and religion sections, and asI browsed, my Amazon wishlist slowly grew. When I was exploring, I came across something beautiful—a small blue book, thin and square. Holding it in my hands, I could feel the blue and white letters sticking out on the cover, spelling “How to Be a Stoic,” along with the names of famous stoic philosophers like Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. The compact, tactile book seemed to hold so much wisdom before I had even opened it. It emitted a sagacious air. Later I would realize that I had judged the book by its cover.
“Rhetoric, an art of persuasive writing or speaking, is often designed to evoke emotion or to present credibility.”
Why did this happen? Somehow, I felt sure that this book was full of insight, and that it would certainly provide some enlightenment to me before I had even opened it. Art is found everywhere in life. In music, on our clothes, in architecture, pop culture, and perhaps, as I realized later, on the cover of books as well. The way that art is present in our world today is often as away to express things in an emotional or conceptual way. In this way, art is a vehicle of expression, for what is deeply human and emotional. There is something psychologically “beautiful” about the colors of a painting or the sounds of music. This cannot be denied—the emotional results of art are everywhere around us.
Something deeply human, for example, is rhetoric. Rhetoric, an art of persuasive writing or speaking, is often designed to evoke emotion or to present credibility. The triangle of persuasive rhetoric, ethos (credibility),pathos (emotion), and logos(logic), is in fact more biased towards creating trust and invoking emotions in the audience. Logic, instead, is only used when the speaker understands the audience to be rational and open-minded—yet most audiences are more susceptible to emotional, rousing orations.
Art, in this way, is very important to human life. However, what use is it? Although the book that I found in the bookstore may have been quite beautiful, that certainly doesn’t change anything about the content of the book itself. Art isn’t philosophically efficient. The expression of emotion or concepts, inherently, doesn’t perform logic itself.
Take the poem A Recollection by John Peale Bishop, describing aRenaissance painting of aVenetian woman. Praising the work and its attractive detail, he writes in the last three lines:
All loveliness demandsour courtesies.
Since she was dead I praised her as I could
Silently, among the Barberini bees.
“The importance of art is that it is inherently psychological, and that everything that humans do is also psychological.”
In stark contrast, when you spell out the first letters of each line, you are left with an obscene insult. At first, Bishop’s hidden message seems artistic. However, he never gives the reason why he hates the painting. The beholder knows that Bishop loathes the painting and the painter, but the beholder knows nothing about why.This is the problem with art—it expresses something emotional, sometimes abstract, but art isn’t quite useful when making rational, logical decisions.The President of the United States does not consult The Beatles when he is ordering a drone strike on a foreign country, and neither do scientists, when they derive useful formulas to solve extremely important issues such as climate change.
So what use is art? Why is it that, in a world where we want to strive for logical reasoning, that somehow, art is everywhere around us?
The importance of art is that it is inherently psychological, and that everything that humans do is also psychological. While art doesn’t perform logic itself, it can express it. In other words, art is used to portray and express logical systems. In this way, art can create a rapid dissemination of ideas. For the vast majority of people, art is persuasive—instead of having to sit down to explicitly detail the logical steps of one’s system, one can invoke pathos, communicating ideas through the emotional vehicle of art.
In 1846, Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis was working as an assistant in the obstetrics department of the University of Vienna. He immediately began to notice the prominence of a certain chilled fever, which seemed to be rampant across all maternity wards in Europe. One in six women who gave birth in the hospital would die of the vicious disease, which decomposed flesh and created a horrible smell. Semmelweis came to the realization that the disease was being spread through hand-to-hand direct contact, not through the air, as common medical doctrine stated at the time. He observed a doctor prick himself in the finger while performing an autopsy on the body of one diseased woman, then seeing the doctor die of the same disease a few days later.
Semmelweis had come upon a significant scientific discovery. However, he faced opposition from traditional doctors, who believed in separate theories about the root cause of the fever. Semmelweis decided to approach this problem by arguing incessantly. Against those opposing him he would vituperate, even against his own followers. When he was finally pressured to write a book explaining all his findings in 1860, what would have been a concise volume turned into an anarchical, irate polemic against his opponents. Over time, he lost the trust of all those surrounding him, turning allies into enemies. Virtually destitute, he died in 1865 at the age of 47.
“Perhaps as a reader, you may have noticed the strange irony of this essay—that I am using art, i.e. written rhetoric, as a medium to express my own reasoning about art itself.”
As we reflect on Semmelweis’s life, something stands out. Perhaps most important to Semmelweis’s life was his genius in discovering the relationship between disease and physical contagion, but also his inability to express credibility nor to appeal to his peers and allies in an organized, composed, and persuasive way. Semmelweis’s lack of rhetoric highlights the usage of art in delivering and portraying useful systems.
Art is also what makes fictional systems work.Fictional systems are essentially ideas and concepts that are not tangible realities. Creating fictitious imagined orders, countries, religions, and companies, we achieved mass collaboration.However, these fictions only existed when many people believed that they did. To ensure that these fictions were water-proof, the most efficient way would be art.
Religions bring comfort and solace to people. Through rituals and beliefs, people can be in states of, for example, “enlightenment”or “satisfaction.” Although perhaps nothing physically beneficial derives from the rituals performed in religious ceremonies, these rituals are inherently artistic.The majority of Renaissance art is concerning some religious matter, oftenChristian. Scenes depicted in paintings such as TheDead Christ Mourned by Annibale Carraci invoke emotions describable in no more than a thousand words.The usage of art as a means to express the ideas and to maintain conceptual orders is undeniable.
In the same sense, nations, such as the UnitedStates, are all imagined orders that rely on art to sustain themselves. As we know, fictional orders exist only if many people believe in them, and to sustain this belief, fictions often employ art to express credibility and to invoke passion. For example, most nations, including the United States, have a national anthem which is played daily to celebrate patriotism. As a U.S. citizen, I grew up listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner”: playing while the colors of the bold American flag fluttered above on a massive, silver pole. Even after doing it hundreds of times, every morning, the same pledge, the same poem, with my right hand over my heart, one nation, under God, I must admit that the U.S.anthem simply never gets old. In many ways, fictional orders such as nations fuel patriotism and attachment through art. Through art, nations, just like religions, rouse passion and patriotism, bolstering their own strength.
Perhaps as a reader, you may have noticed the strange irony of this essay—that I am using art, i.e. written rhetoric, as a medium to express my own reasoning about art itself. Artis undeniably omnipresent.As much as we would like, the world perceived and acted upon by humans is never perfectly logical—the glue which holds these human systems together is art, the most ultimate vehicle of human emotion and abstraction.
Courtesy of Katelyn Cui.