In Defense of the Unnecessary

There is a great focus on what is necessary and unnecessary...in school, in government, in life.  Yes, barnacles can grow on a ship and must be scraped off, but if we really tried to live all aspects of life with the bare necessities, our lives would look much different, and I do not think we would like them very much, nor should we.

Art Is The Signature of Man

Aeneas and Dido in Carthage, Claude Lorrain, 1675

In his 1925 book The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton wrote, "Art is the signature of man."  I have spoken and written many times about the scene in Book 1 of Vergil's epic poem the Aeneid in which Aeneas and his friend stand on a hill and overlook the building of the city of Carthage.  Vergil describes what they see in the chronological order of a developing society.  First, they notice the physical construction of buildings and roads, next the establishment of government and laws, and finally the establishment of a theatre.  As I always point out to my students, had the Carthaginians stopped before they built a theatre, theirs would have been an abbreviated society.  Creating things is what we human beings do.  Although some see it so, the artistic act is not an unnecessary one.  It is vital to who we are.

Art For a Purpose

Art, and by that I mean graphic art, musical art, and dramatic art, serves many purposes, but for the purpose of this article, let's focus on its purpose in education.  We all know people, and perhaps are those people ourselves, who come alive when given a creativity opportunity.  In school these are the students who want to draw or write.  They would prefer to act out a story rather than take an exam over it.  It is band or orchestra or choir that helps them get through algebra and history and P.E.

Woodburning of the Colosseum by one of my students

We must provide as many such opportunities for young people as we can, and to do so, we may need to take money from elsewhere, even from areas whose superiority goes unquestioned however much it may go unacknowledged, such as the STEM subjects and sports.  Surely no one would be so monstrous as to say that the needs of one child are less important than those of another or that the abilities of one are insignificant when compared with others, and if we do indeed believe that it would be monstrous to say this, we must put time and money behind our words.  Yet there is more, far more, to the role of art in human life.

Ars Gratia Artis

MGM Logo from 1928-1956

Although the lion has changed over the years, the motto of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM, movie studio has remained Ars Gratia Artis, or "Art For the Sake of Art," and there we find the connection back to Chesterton.  Art need not have a function.  It can, but this is not necessary for its value.  It is valuable simply because it is what human beings do.  We create.  We explore.  We imagine.  In fact, it is our imagination that makes the hypothetical and the conditional possible.  Perhaps electricity can be used to light a home, we say, and from our imagination come the lights we depend on to turn our nights into days.  "If I were in Rome," says a friend, "I would visit the Colosseum," and it is the imagination that makes this conditional sentence possible.  Yet whether or not anyone ever got around to creating a lightbulb or our friend ever managed a trip to Italy is irrelevant.  What matters is our capacity to imagine what is not real.  What matters is our capacity for art, and it is in this that Chesterton is correct.  It is the signature of the human race.