Hamburg, Germany, spring of 2016.
It is early afternoon and some friends and I are wandering around the city. Weather is foggy and everything is wet from the short and light rainfalls, that were coming and going during the past days. Not much is going on, probably because of the time of the day and the not so inviting weather. We are walking through a square, with some nicely designed benches and a sculpture in the shape of a cube. I stop for a moment, looking at the sculpture and thinking: this is beautiful.
Some things just make our life beautiful, I remember thinking.
Wait, what? Did I, the -proudly- hardcore technocrat, who always valued things based on their practicality and usefulness, appreciated a metal cube in the middle of a square, that all it was doing was taking space? Well, yeah, I guess I did. I suppose some things are meant to make our life beautiful. Not only that, but we should appreciate having them.
This naive and rather obvious realization, was the beginning of my appreciation of art. Did this mean I became an art connoisseur? No, definitely not. Did it maybe mean that I started liking all sorts of art? Nope, that neither. It meant however, that I stopped ignoring art and started paying attention to it.
I guess everyone goes through a phase in their lives where they are questioning things. Part of that phase for me was to question anything that was impractical, or didn’t add any tangible value. But then one day, you see a metal cube sitting in a square and that sight somehow manages to penetrate that technocratic armor and cause a small smile inside of you. Acknowledging that that cube had a purpose and appreciating it just for being beautiful, was a turning point.
On my desk, I have a picture of a bunch of gears. Standard, uninteresting gears, like the ones that mechanical engineers spend their university years studying about. As you move your eyes from right to left across the picture, there are some flowers popping up, and by the time you reach the bottom left corner, there are no more gears. All you see is flowers. I don’t know what the artist was trying to convey, but for me, this shows that practicality and beauty can and can go hand-in-hand.
Correction: practicality and beauty should go hand-in-hand.
Jack Ma, Alibaba’s1 co-founder and one of the wealthiest people in the world, has also advocated in multiple occasions that arts is something we should not treat as a luxury, but something that we should teach all kids. In the video below, he explains why without arts and soft skills, the next generation of people will not be able to compete against machines:
The leader of one of the biggest technology companies2 in the world, is not advocating in favor of teaching kids programming, or machine learning, but painting and music. He is advocating that we should focus on teaching arts, instead of down-playing them or even worse, ignoring them.
What is art?
I don’t know if there is such a thing as a definition of art. If I were to attempt to provide one, it would look something like this:
Art is one’s work that aims to stir emotions, or conversely, one’s emotions that resulted in a piece of work.
Art is the Starry Night from van Gogh and the graffiti on the neighborhood wall. Art is the book that you won’t let go of, until you reach the end. Art is the poster you find in a flee market and you immediately imagine it hanging on your living room wall. Art is the interview that will captivate you till the end and the Disney movie that will make you cry your eyes out3. Art is the ballet that you will see at the opera and the music a person is playing at the metro station. Art is the photo of an old man drinking his morning coffee and the photo of a Syrian refugee carrying his daughter away from war.
Does grouping art in categories matter?
In my opinion, it doesn’t. Yes, you might gravitate towards watching movies more than going to photo galleries, but you can never tell what will cause the next ripple of emotions. It could be a movie or it could be a photo. It could be a song or it could be a painting. The type of art shouldn’t matter, as long as it hits the spot.
Why do we need art?
Maybe it is easier to answer this with another question: What would we do without it? If I am right, and art is either the cause or the result of emotions, no art would mean no emotions. And what is life without emotions?
Art is not what keeps us alive. We cannot feed off of art, nor can we use art to protect ourselves from the elements of nature. But emotions, and hence art, is what we live for. I don’t know if my explanation gives art the credit it deserves. Luckily though, the are other men, great men, who have already done this for me.
In the film Dead Poets Society, the late Robin Williams gives a short monologue about poetry and arts in general. Teaching a class of high-profile students, that are groomed to be USA’s future leaders, R. Williams will tell them:
Medicine, law, business, engineering; these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
These are what we stay alive for.
Any description will do the scene wrong, so here is the scene itself:
In his 2020 TED Talk4, Ethan Hawk, who by the way also plays in Dead Poets Society5, argues that:
Art is not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance.
“Most people don’t spend much time thinking about poetry”, he says. At least not until something life-changing happens, either towards the better, or towards the worse. And then boom, we are completely lost, trying to figure out what is going on. Trying to figure out life. And that is when “art is not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance”.
The magic starts at 1:51, but I strongly recommend watching the whole video.
Goosebumps.
Sincerely,
- The Naive Ignorant
PS: Substack just introduced the new Direct Message function, so feel free to use it. Just click the button below :)
Alibaba is an e-commerce platform.
You could argue Alibaba is a retail company and not a technology company, but that is not so important in this case.
Yes, yes another TED talk.
You can see him at the very end of the video.
Should art come with a meaning, or is the meaning in the eye of the audience? Should people be offended by a frog on a crucifix? Is performing art, art? Is body modification art? so many questions, so little time!