Does Art Serve Any Purpose?

[MarkBastable]

Come to think about it, he might be right about the rich having no taste.

When I was broke, I used to like Chekhov, Mahler and Picasso. But since I've made a few quid, I find myself increasingly drawn to Die Hard, Justin Bieber and pictures of kittens peeking out of battered hats. Perhaps I should just give it all away so that I can enjoy the National Portrait Gallery again.

[MystyrMystyry]

But those examples may equally be early onset Oldtimers

[prickly_pete]

The reality is that we might question why nearly anything is taught in school beyond a basic level.

OK, we can question math and science but where are the engineers going to come from? Where are the lab technicians going to get training? Where are people going to learn the necessary background for designing software to make our lives easier? Where are the doctors going to come from?

Art is a little different. That's going to occur by itself quite naturally whereas an advanced technological society is something that has to be consciousless supported. You look at Afghanistan and all they really do in school is study the Koran - literature in other words - how far has that society come now?

Now, again, I'm not against art or literature classes but why would we load the course syllabus with material that is now irrelevant to our everyday lives? For an American to be forced to read Shakespeare is not that far off from forcing them to read the Koran. They both have nothing to do with the culture they've grown up in.

[prickly_pete]

Trojan virus is used even if people has no knowledge of homer. They would link to achilles heel naturally (even if it is not actually homeric). Obviously, classical oldest literature is naturally expressed on daily usage.

Patently ridiculous. The vast majority of people I would wager know the story of David and Goliath. That story takes up about half a page in the book of Samuel. So does that mean because I know the story of David and Goliath that I have a working knowledge of the Bible? Patently ridiculous.

Shakespeare didnt wrote for a narraow audience. At all. He wrote at sametime for the lower classes of london and the nobility.

See my above post. Anyone can get into a museum or art exhibit nowdays. Anyone can goto a Barnes & Noble and buy Heidigger. Does that mean these folks produce for the general audience? Patently ridiculous.

he is the most popular writer ever

Only because of the predominance of English in the modern world. If he had lived in Lithuania nobody would've ever heard of him. I'm sure if Croatian was a world wide language Ivo Andric would be the most popular writer ever, but since it isn't we don't know about him.

Hollywood main source

Negative. The vast majority of hollywood films EVER produced have absolutely nothing to do with Shakespeare.

Alas, Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet is the most reckonozied teenage drama. I do not want anything, the entire word has reference to it. It is part of cultural life o most people.

Again, see above. People having heard of Romeo and Juliet and having some vague idea of what the story consists of doesn't mean much. People have heard of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Is Aesop part of their cultural expierence as well? Not really...but I wouldn't deny that there are a handfull of stories from the past that are still used in application to everyday life. The question is: are these mere specs on the cultural map enough to warrant teaching the entire Western Cannon of art and literature and making it far and away the predominant focus of art programs? Probably not.

Nothing is part of cultural life of most people. Most people has no use for physicas, chemistry, biology. Darwin is even denied by a large population of America (Shakespeare is not).

Again, we actually need this stuff though. Americans have a cultural life - movies, music, sports, etc. Apparently the culture they grew up with isn't good enough so we cram archaic works down their throats. This I find morally repugnant.

You must teach both

Why? Why not teach dog shows as well? Its just as relevant to most people as Shakespeare.

[MarkBastable]

Pete,

Is your argument that art serves absolutely no purpose at all, or that it's not as vital as some other things?

[MarkBastable]

The reality is that we might question why nearly anything is taught in school beyond a basic level. Seriously, the mathematics that I studied beyond middle-school have had absolutely no relevant use to me. I studied history, geography, biology, mythology and many other topics that I quite likely could have gotten along well without.

I think Luke has a good point. I read somewhere - in a book or something, y'know - that by the age of eight you know everything you need to know in order to survive, even in an industrialised society. Nothing you learn after that is really necessary, if the necessity is to have a fair shot at feeding yourself, finding shelter and passing on your genes.

It may be of course that society as we know it would fall apart without qualified electricians - but people would still survive. We can be sure of that - because human beings got along fine without electricians for many thousands of years.

Could a society get along without art? Well, you'd think so, if you were trying to determine what art does to keep a society going. And yet, although many human societies have struggled by without microwave ovens or efficient mass transit networks, not many - perhaps none - have ever got along without art. Which would suggest that it does have some purpose, even if we can't figure out what it is.

[MystyrMystyry]

See that's where the argument is wrong

When you say 'most people' you're speaking about those who don't have a comprehensive education - why should society stoop to the lowest common (idiot) denominator when soaring to the heights is patently preferable

If Shakespeare's lost on you and all you ever understand is that 50cent lucked his way through by being in the right place at the right time - then you will accept minimal talent as being superior to genius

Your personal cultural experience has skewed your view of beauty and perfection by taking shortcuts through and bypassing worthwhile cultural icons and benchmarks - are the great achievements too difficult for you to encompass?

I've embraced Shakespeare, Dickens, Michelangelo, Matisse, Beethoven and Bach - and a million others - and my life is far richer for it than if I'd accepted only the dross that they who would do so try to spoonfeed the unwary

Shakespeare is as relevant to the intelligent today as he was in his own time - and the more you learn the more you see it in everything: cultural references are everywhere in the arts and the more allusions you comprehend the more your appreciation increases

The trick is to seek the big picture, not the little one - your brain is like a muscle and needs exercise lest it wither and die

Here's a quick example of cross-reference relevance: you're watching a John Ford western filmed in the 1950's. It's been advertised as a Western and for all intents and purposes looks like a Western, but is it really a Western?

Well it is, but actually it's closer to being a film about the Korean War than any stylised version of How The West Was Won

See? An entire subtext that you could have gone your entire life unaware of and I've just shortcut it for you thus depriving you of the Eureka moment that you may have worked out for yourself. Why? Because 'The 1950's! Western! Dat ain't my kulcha, man!'

As a side note, are you aware the U.S. never signed a peace treaty with North Korea? Yep - the war's still on!

[MystyrMystyry]

You snuck in there Mark

[prickly_pete]

Pete,

Is your argument that art serves absolutely no purpose at all, or that it's not as vital as some other things?

Well the generation of art is going to happen on its own accord so I don't know if "vital" is exactly the word because its hard to imagine a human society without it. Shoot, I mean even simple relays of information - even in these we see a human need to impart some kind of aesthetic quality into everyday speech. Say I got in a car accident for instance and went home to tell my wife. Its hard to imagine me walking in and being like "Crash. Car done." Instead I'd give some elaborate story - that if someone took the time to analyze - would reveal dramatic pauses, climaxes, and so on. So even here, in everyday speech, we're all artists to some degree. The point is this is something that occured quite naturally to me because of my cultural life. Nobody had to tell me "dramatic pause in x,y and z situations for effect." It's just something that's done.

A culture is much like language in that its probably impossible to talk as though we're outside of it. We have art sports, movies, popular music - shoot, ever been to the South Bronx? There's art on every building! To act as though art isn't going to happen unless its instructred is like saying we'd never be able to speak unless we took and English class.

So yeah, it's going to happen whether we have art classes or not. My question then is why do we have art classes? And if we do need them for some tangible purpose (other than vague concepts like "opening the mind" or "exploring different worlds" that mean different things to different people) then why does it have to be classical art? If classical literature for instance isn't part of our cultural life - which is unequivocally isn't for the vast majority of people - then what purpose would teaching it serve? We know what purpose math and science serves. I'm not so sure what purpose Shakespeare serves outside of, again, convoluted ideas like "opening the mind" or there was once a Leonardo Di Caprio movie based on a Shakespeare play because if these are the best justifications you can give for teaching Shakespeare than you might want to reevaluate your outlook on things.

[prickly_pete]

why should society stoop to the lowest common (idiot) denominator when soaring to the heights is patently preferable

What are these 'heights' you speak of? Where can I observe those? Define 'heights' exactly?

These are ridiculous concepts that aren't any substantively different than saying we should read Shakespeare because it expresses "truth" or "the sublime" or "essences." This is all talk from a long bygone area. We've been out of the muddle for sometime now. No need to go on talking like this.

[Rores28]

Pete,

Is your argument that art serves absolutely no purpose at all, or that it's not as vital as some other things?

Neither, the argument has been whittled down to "why teach Shakespeare in school."

edit, "Why teach Shakespeare in public school?"

[prickly_pete]

Neither, the argument has been whittled down to "why teach Shakespeare in school."

Whoa, nothing has been whittled at all here. Nobody is discussing this seriously - just alot of hot air about "opening minds" and "enriching ones soul". Fluff is all I've heard thus far.

My original question in post #1 - I can't see how this isn't bound up with my other question of why teach the classics.

What purpose does art serve? Creates common experiences that can relayed through a common cultural dialogue. If Shakespeare (I'm just using him as an example of all classics) isn't part of a common cultural experience why bother?

[Drkshadow03]

I agree St Luke, he's looking more and more like a troll, a Glenn Beck wannabe whose just "asking questions." Even though, the question itself is old hat. Why do we need those arts? At some point I begin to wonder if it's an either/or issue; you either get it or you don't.

We've all given him essentially the same response. So there seems to be some agreement, but the only real response he has given to the idea that art opens up your mind and the world, and that a critical language is needed to understand art as deeply as possible, hence why you need to study it, is that these are "cliche" and "convoluted" responses, which doesn't actually rebut the point.

P_P seem to at least agree that art has a seminal role as a part of culture. So a large part of understanding another culture and time period is to understand their art (reason to study it).

Of course, this is really just a variant of what we have all been saying all along: reading literature or engaging with art allows you to view your own culture or other people's cultures or other time periods or problems that most people have to face in their life (say coping with the death of a loved one) in a dramatic fashion that helps you emotionally deal with those issues or think about those issues intellectually by proxy of a fictitious character experiencing them and in a way that also entertains (what literature does).

However, the very nature of art is to hold up a mirror to experience and rework and retell our experiences through artifice. We need to learn about literature in order to develop the critical thinking skills to understand it and our world that expresses itself through cultural means (such as literature), develop an understanding of the types and tropes of stories that reoccur throughout societies, and to understand the various components that make up a literary work (the reason to study it).

PP's argument has basically broken down into a fallacious appeal to novelty. Old things = bad and irrelevant. New things = good and useful. There is no reason to think older literature is less relevant than newer literature or less relevant than other mediums such as film (which has merits in its own right).

So why study specifically Shakespeare in literature classes in America? Well, for starters America begins as a British Colony and Shakespeare is a British author. So in that sense he does form a backdrop of our cultural heritage. More importantly, the early Americans up until the 19th century saw Shakespeare as a seminal part of their cultural heritage (source). I would agree that somewhere in the 20th century Shakespeare lost some of his appeal to the masses. However, as already noted Shakespeare still thrives across the U.S., which all have well-attended Shakespeare festivals and Hollywood continually produces films based on the Bard's work, including modern takes, that do well in the box office. (relevant to our larger cultural history and a cross-section of the literate population).

More importantly, Shakespeare's plays when you get to their core are about universal experiences and feelings that all people can relate to across time period and cultures, hence why his popularity has endured. He is relevant to people's everyday lives precisely for that reason. While not everyone walks around depressed like Hamlet, I think most people at some point in their lives have felt life was pointlessness and questioned if its all meaningless ("How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.") So despite the antiquated language, the situations within the plays, the character's feelings and thoughts are still relatable to a modern person, still, in fact, speaks to our experiences as people living in a contemporary world (reason for study).

He is considered by most scholars to be one of the best, if not the best, writer in English. Since I already gave reasons for why we should study literature and the arts in the first place, the reason to study Shakespeare in those classes is that if students are going to study literature it makes sense that they should study the best literature has to offer. (reason for study).

Anyone who has spent time actually reading other works of literature, both new and old, American or otherwise, knows that Shakespeare allusions and references abound in literature. So to fully understand other literature that let's for the sake of argument say is more relevant, requires you to have some working knowledge of Shakespeare's works. In other words, Shakespeare is a seminal part of studying literature as a discipline in general (reason for study).

[zoolane]

It seems like art arose out of a need to communicate ideas to non-literate societies. Sort of the way a totem poel told the history of a tribe to its memebers.

Now that everyone can read, what's the point really? Is there anything that art can express that can't just as easily be communicated through speach? Forgive me if I sound a little crude, but I've been reading about the ongoing debate about the role of the arts in public schools and I'm just kind of curious how you all feel about this. Does art really have anything to offer students? Should it be taught at the expense of mathematics and science?

For instance, why go to an art exhibit? What could that offer me?

Art of any sort such writing, singing, painting is creative outlet which people need to able to express their self thought what ever mean possible clothes they wear or music listen. Everyone should have creative outlet to release inner fears or happy in their self.

If you were suppression and not be able express yourself ideas or feeling creative it can have dangerous effect I think.

Why everyone should going to art exhibit ail least second in their life time?
Because show different culture and ideas of life and different aspect. Maybe might sparkle of something in you.

[JCamilo]

Patently ridiculous. The vast majority of people I would wager know the story of David and Goliath. That story takes up about half a page in the book of Samuel. So does that mean because I know the story of David and Goliath that I have a working knowledge of the Bible? Patently ridiculous.

Sorry, Sir. But your exampel was a line of a movie by Clint Eastwood, far from his more popular those days. I gave you more. And those are examples of those identidy you admire in the Jews. They do not need to know all texts, they do however know about it.

And we are not talking about knowleage, but the casual modern manifestation.

See my above post. Anyone can get into a museum or art exhibit nowdays. Anyone can goto a Barnes & Noble and buy Heidigger. Does that mean these folks produce for the general audience? Patently ridiculous.

Shakespeare is not a museum. He wrote to general audience because this audience was his income source. They could understand him? Like a specialist, no. But he did wrote to them, one can easily see how his plays are filled with popular themes, his comedies, etc. He is not Francis Bacon.

Only because of the predominance of English in the modern world. If he had lived in Lithuania nobody would've ever heard of him. I'm sure if Croatian was a world wide language Ivo Andric would be the most popular writer ever, but since it isn't we don't know about him.

Sure, then why not some other author? The english predominance raises at the end of XIX century. Shakespeare english was even outdated. You had Poe's tales written to general public, you had Kipling fables, you had H.G.Wells, Faulkner... I dunno who, but it is Shakespeare, an outdated english writer who wrote no prose. It is rather obvious, his quality helps a lot. And saddly for Americans, english is more predominant for then than for brazilians.

Negative. The vast majority of hollywood films EVER produced have absolutely nothing to do with Shakespeare.

Which is not what I claimed. He is the main source, which implies only that from all sources Hollywood has, he is the most used. And Surprisingly, unlike your claim, Movies, Hollywood, modern american culture shows Shakespeare relevance. It would be much easier if you were aiming Cervantes...

Again, see above. People having heard of Romeo and Juliet and having some vague idea of what the story consists of doesn't mean much. People have heard of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Is Aesop part of their cultural expierence as well? Not really...but I wouldn't deny that there are a handfull of stories from the past that are still used in application to everyday life. The question is: are these mere specs on the cultural map enough to warrant teaching the entire Western Cannon of art and literature and making it far and away the predominant focus of art programs? Probably not.

Well, Fables are efficient because they are always part of their cultural experience, but anyways, what place you are talking about? Kids are not taught the whole Western Cannon.

Again, we actually need this stuff though. Americans have a cultural life - movies, music, sports, etc. Apparently the culture they grew up with isn't good enough so we cram archaic works down their throats. This I find morally repugnant.

You dont. Science is irrelevant for most people. I have use for biology as I have fishes, but a hundred more usefull is the fact I know Shakespeare. It actually the reason why people pay me to write. The creationist debate over evolution actually shows how irrelevant science can be in teaching.

Why? Why not teach dog shows as well? Its just as relevant to most people as Shakespeare.

Yes, you would probally be happy to know, so schools probally teach people to handle horses. I am sure hunting was considered part of education at some time.