What is art for?
In his book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton describes beautifully what art is for. He also, explains how some of us perceive art and how priceless art is. His language is so beautiful that it would be an injustice to write that in my own words. Hence, sharing the excerpts directly from the book below.
“There are people out buying coffee, sandwiches, papers or new heels for their shoes, servicing their essential and practical requirements. In the midst of such activity, it seems logical enough to ask exactly what Taylor’s art might be for. To help us to notice what we have already seen. The tree paintings endeavor to excite and command our attention. They are in a sense comparable to advertising billboards, though instead of forcing us to focus on a specific brand of margarine or discounted airline fares, they incite us to contemplate the meaning of nature, the yearly cycles of growth and decay, the intricacies of the vegetal and animal realms, our lost connection with the earth and the redemptive powers of modest dappled things. We might define art as anything which pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions.
Nevertheless, Taylor is suspicious of any attempt to summarize art in words. He insists that a worthy painting will automatically render all commentary inadequate because it must influence and affect our senses rather than our logical faculties. To convey the particularity of artistic work, he quotes Hegel’s definition of painting and music as genres dedicated to the ‘sensuous presentation of ideas’. We require such ‘sensuous’ arts, Hegel suggested, because many important truths will impress themselves upon our consciousness only if they have been molded from sensory, emotive material. We may, for example, need a song to alert us in a visceral way to the importance of forgiving others, a notion to which we might previously have assented purely in a rote and stagnant way after reading of it in a political tract – just as it may only be in front of a successful painting of an oak tree that we are in any position to feel, as opposed dutifully to accept, the significance of the natural world. The great works of art have about them the quality of a reminder. They fix that which is fugitive: the cooling shadow of an oak on a windless, hot summer afternoon; the golden-brown tint of leaves in the early days of autumn; the stoical sadness of a bare tree glimpsed from a train, outlined against a heavy gray sky. At the same time, it is forgotten aspects of our own psyches to which paintings can seem mysteriously conjoined. It can be our unspoken longings that surprise us in the trees, and our adolescent selves that we recognize in the hazy tint of a summer sky. It is hard to buy paintings when one knows so little about what prestigious forces think of them.”
We often buy art as a home decor and here is how some of us see the art pieces that adorn the walls of our living rooms.
“During the last week of the show, the smallest oak of all, a mere ten centimeters high, made up of oil paint on board, is bought by a dentist from Milton Keynes. Susan hangs it in the living room, where it coexists, and competes for attention, with television, a set of wooden camels from Luxor and Noddy and Tessie Bear’s village. Susan enjoys showing the work to friends. This has nothing to do with vaunting wealth or status. In a sense which is not entirely clear to her, she wishes to tell others that she is a bit like the painting. She has seen the tree before. It is the tree from her childhood in Somerset which she passed on her way to school. It is the tree she saw on cycle rides through the Durham countryside at the University. It is the tree which stood in a field across from the hospital when she gave birth to her first son. Like a modern, secular icon, the painting creates a magnetic field around itself, proposing a fitting attitude and code of conduct for its viewers. The ordinary business of the day normally intrudes insistently on the goings-on in the living room. The television is a jealous screen. Noddy rarely misses a chance to make himself heard. Yet occasionally, late at night, when the rest of the household is in bed, Susan will linger a few moments over the painting and feel herself subtly aligning with its personality and recovering thereby an amplified sense of her history and humanity.”
Why art is priceless?
“Backdated across two years, Taylor has earnt the equivalent of the annual salary of an unsuccessful plumber. There is an impractical side of human nature particularly open to making sacrifices for the sake of creating objects that are more graceful and intelligent than we normally manage to be. Taylor is undaunted by his fortunes.”
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