Manifesto 3: More on the social role of Art

Art is a container

Art is a glass from which we can drink the water of truth.

Art is a bottle in which our root values can be stored.

Art is a box in which the ideas – the greatest treasures of any civilization – can be delivered to a new doorstep.

Human society stands, as it always has, on a knife edge between civilization and barbarity.  To one side we become more advanced, more subtle, nobler, and more virtuous; to the other we become mere animals, even monsters.  In every age we face the choice between advancing toward ways of existing and thriving that benefit us all, or falling toward ways which drive us all into deadly warfare against each other.  Cooperation or competition.  Compassion or cruelty.  Prosperity or paucity.  Abundance or scarcity.  

What forces or factors push us one way or the other?  What motivates our choice?

This argument is not concerned with exactly how anyone answers that question, nor is it a defense of one answer over others.  Science, Religion, Humanism, Tradition, Evolution, Nationalism, Empiricism, The Free Market, whatever.  The point to make here is that whichever capitalized noun we might choose, we did not build it up out of our own heads.  We had to learn it from somewhere.  Something was given to each of us, well before any of us were old enough to understand or question it, really, which supplied the basic building blocks of a worldview into which the data points of our experiences and observations had to be fit before we could make intellectual, practical, or moral use of them in the real world.

There is a natural process of assembling a worldview which may be supposed to operate in each of us from childhood.  We observe things, we imitate people bigger than us, we try things and notice what works and what doesn’t.  Every human does this long before they would be able to grasp the difference between philosophies or religions, and while it is not even close to enough philosophical ground to build a life on, it does seem to provide an initial platform from which to reach toward fuller and more versatile mental systems.  (Caution is needed here: the word “natural” used above will ring automatic bells in many minds – those for whom “Natural” is in fact their Capitalized Noun, and those who suppose that “Natural” can serve that function.  It is important to remember that once “Natural” becomes its own value judgement, a Capitalized Noun in itself, we have in fact already left the initial childhood process to which “natural” referred above.  They are not the same, and are not to be conflated.)

Now, a person might object that their Capitalized Noun is better than all the others because it is based on something superior or exterior to that initial childhood process.  Rather than refute this objection on the grounds of developmental psychology (since such an argument, even expertly made, would be circular), instead let us consider a simpler razor: how did one learn that their Capitalized Noun was better than the others?  Not by experience, since it can readily be observed that people embrace their Capitalized Noun long before they have had enough life experience to have made enough observations to justify such confidence.   No matter what underpinnings of logic or observation there are under an idea in its final form, any human has to learn from somewhere somehow the intellectual tools and skills to build and use them.  One is taught – by positive or by negative example.  One accepts or deliberately rejects ideas thrust upon them by adults and “The Establishment” – but either way, the thought patterns which they will use to weigh and evaluate all further ideas come into one from outside, from somewhere.  

How then does one acquire the basic ideas which become those tools?  They must be preserved and stored by the larger culture in which one grows, and then imparted to individuals- through discourse to a sufficiently mature individual, but before that point of maturity, through art.  Here, the heading of “art” includes stories, songs, pictures, sculptures, and whatever other experiences which humans may engineer for the benefit of others.  

Art is the container which allows the storage and the transmission of ideas, especially the fundamental ideas on which and within which we build our understanding of the world.  Every human (practically) receives the ideas of thought, the paradigms by which to mentally structure their world, in some package formed by art.  (What would the exception be?  Suppose a baby is born, but separated immediately from its parents, experiences no human contact or communication of any form at all until the age of, say, 25.  Such a person would never have received ideas through stories, songs, pictures, or any other artwork.  Does a child even survive under such conditions?  Supposing they do, what would their mentality be like?  I do not propose to try the experiment; to do so would be unforgivably cruel.)

Even logical argument requires the artful use of language.  Teaching materials as dry as Euclid, or Pliny, or a bog-standard high school chemistry textbook still require the art of arranging words into memorable sentences, arranging ideas into a logical and self-supporting sequence, and examples to connect the abstract with the concrete world.  The job may or may not be done well.  There may or may not be a perceptible “artistry” in the work.  But many of the skills needed by poets and balladeers are critical to the enterprise of conveying even the driest scientific or factual information.   Waddle and Farthington’s Oxidized Covalent Bonds in Organic Chemistry may never match Treasure Island for interest or inspiration, but they both require a similar process: the process of Art.

But like everything else humans do, Art itself must be learned.  Even the skills and tools to receive it (beyond a certain very shallow level) must be received – there is a bootstrap process for Art.  And how is Art learned?  How are the tools to receive messages through Art acquired?  By living in a world of humans who are themselves doing and learning to do Art.  All the different arts have a potential role to play in the formation of each thinking mind.  There is no safe or meaningful way to divide them up between “useful, potentially valuable arts” and “accessory, luxury arts”.  All are necessary, all are critical to civilization.  

And yet, market value is never enough to sustain artistic activity at a level where it can in turn sustain civilization.  There are never enough people with enough disposable resources to spend on enough art to keep artists in business; there never will be.  And there is a real limit to which artists can continue creating art if they must first spend themselves on full-time (or more) empolyment in order to subsist.  Therefore, Art and Artists must be supported by the general civilization, or it falls.  If it must lean on consumerism, it suffocates (and is suffocated).  For not only are the resources far too limited, the commercial paradigm is toxic inherently.  The majority of consumers will not themselves have enough knowledge or skill to receive the most subtle points of the artworks they consume; most of the fans of the artist known as “Kenny G” have no idea why so many jazz musicians despise his music.   And that is fine, with no judgement passed on anyone. However, if consumer demand and market forces are to be made the final or only arbiters of Art, then only the most base and brutal artwork can survive; it will drive out everything higher or better than itself, because the number of cognoscenti is always drowned out by the voice of the masses.  But the artworks created by and for the sophisticated are an important part of art as a whole, and play a critical role in art’s mission of storing and carrying the value threads and challenges to perspective without which civilization is reduced to mere animality.

The argument here is not at all to deny the value or importance of works in the commercial entertainment industry.  They have their birthright, and their necessary roles to play just as much as the academic, the historical, the classical, or the erudite.  All are necessary.  None are optional.  Therefore, if there are not systemic supports for art outside and alongside the commercial market, then Art is crippled; it is unable to do the job for which we desperately need it.

Thus, it is necessary for avenues to exist to support artists who work outside the corporate or commercial world.  And those avenues must have resources to draw on beyond simple consumerism.  Even private charitable foundations are not enough; there must be support from the State – which is the only mechanism by which civilization writ large can support anything, drawing from the whole population.

It is just for the whole population to contribute to funding for Art; the whole population whether it goes to museums or not depends on the culture that itself depends on a thriving artistic life.  Society as a whole is definitely better off with artists than without them, and better off with artists who can live on their art without being controlled by corporate management.   

And there must be organized collective support for the Arts, but that support must not be tied to any form of authoritarian control over what Artists say.   The thing we need from the Arts is Truth, which is the very opposite of “what the authorities want you to think” in so many circumstances.  Art cannot tell the truths it sometimes must tell if its existence is conditional on the approval of entrenched economic or social powers, or if the life or livelihood of artists is at risk unless they toe the line of an authority-holder.   In the end, the argument here is the same as the argument against “market control” of the arts: the necessary truth will always be silenced whenever human powers have the means to do so.  

That may seem unduly pessimistic, but it is absolute unavoidable fact.  Any entity with power tends to find reasons to believe that keeping its power is Best For Everyone.  Therefore, eventually, any means to ensure keeeping that power seems Best For Everyone and therefore justified.  Control over the arts has throughout history been considered a basic step to preserving authority and power; therefore, Authority will always desire that control which is precisely destructive to the effectiveness of Art in preserving the cultural, ethical, and moral values which are essential to all civilization.  And what forces or factors could ever sway a holder of Authority in such a way that they would choose not to subjugate all other factors and persons to the preservation and maximization of their own power?  Only cultural values which in turn can be carried, stored, and delivered to them only through Art, made and directed by Artists with the freedom to speak inconvenient, even unpopular truths to power-- even truths which holders of power may consider seditious.  

Art is not optional; it is absolutely vital to any society, especially one which aspires to anything like freedom.  Art must be supported (at least in part) systemically by society as a whole, but never controlled or censored either by political or by business concerns.  Commercially self-supporting or profitable artworks have a legitimate place in Art’s function, but it cannot be the only avenue for artistic endeavor.  A society may feel that its resources would be better spent on arming its soldiers for war—but those soldiers cannot and will not fight without knowing what for, and why they should, and only through a healthy and functioning art world can that happen.  (The point of a bayonet in a soldier’s back can only accomplish so much, as anyone with real military experience can affirm.)   A society may feel that all possible resources should be diverted to the owners of business capital so that they can do what they have always claimed to do; but again, without a through line of Art, there are no values to keep them from destroying themselves.

Art contains and carries ideas, and ideas vary greatly in quality and value.  Some ideas are good, and others are terrible.  But the only way to sift out the good from the bad is through examination, debate, discussion, and discourse – all of which are impossible without the foundation of Art and culture.  This is true of economic ideas, scientific ideas, moral ideas, all ideas; a healthy population of artists is absolutely necessary for society as a whole to recognize and decide among them.   One sometimes hears the complaint that people should be able just to tell the truth without couching it in the techniques of art – but telling even the simplest truth requires art, perhaps more art than telling lies.

Individual artworks may carry little or no effective or actionable truth to individual observers, and that is fine.  It is Art as a whole which carries the treasure – the sum of all artworks, abstract, concrete, good, bad, impenetrable, obvious, lofty, vulgar, Dionysian, Appolonian, all of it.  All art together adds up to the functioning organism that can do what civilization needs.  And humanity has never been in more dire need of some more civilization than it is right now.

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(Edited to correct typographical errors)