Last night the local Socrates Cafe group struggled over the nature of art. The specific question was whether \u201cart\u201d is confined to what artists do when practicing what is generally accepted as an \u201cart form\u201d (i.e., music, painting, sculpture, acting, etc.); or whether it is legitimate to say that \u201cart\u201d applies to other human endeavors, such as a doctor who is so good at what he does as to seem artistic. <\/p>\n
One guy thought that using \u201cart\u201d to describe what doctors and scientists and even accountants do when they are at their best is a dilution and corruption of what is meant when we speak of an art. He said that true artists seek to play on the human soul in an evocative manner; they seek to convey something of the true essence of living to others, to make others appreciative of their being and the world around them. And accountants just don’t do that in balancing their books.<\/p>\n
That all sounds pretty good. But I still disagree with the guy. I admit that \u201cthe arts\u201d, as they are usually known, attract and interest people who are \u201cartistic\u201d; i.e. people who want to live a life evoking the almost indescribable essence and joy of existence, the purest and most valuable feelings of a life well lived. These people are truly dedicated to their visions, as they compromise their ability to live with relative comfort and economic security that other vocations usually allow. I.e., they reject becoming accountants for a reason. <\/p>\n
However, I think that even an accountant can find that \u201cfeeling of truly having lived\u201d within her or his life. Accountants are called to do their jobs well and to make moral decisions (think of all the immoral accounting decisions made in recent years by Enron and Bear Sterns and the subprime mortgage companies). They deal with other people, they fall in love and raise families. They are just as involved in society as anyone else. They can live their lives in an \u201cartistic\u201d fashion, integrating values and virtue into their career, their friendships, their family and their dealings with community. They can make life their artful, turn life into a work of art, make it something beyond money and ego. I venture to say that most people, accountants or otherwise, generally don’t achieve this. That’s what keeps therapists and manufacturers of depression medicine so busy. <\/p>\n
If my friend is right, this is as it should be; artists should be artistic, and the rest of us should live at a lower level of passion and intensity; quiet desperation, comfortably numb, never fulfilled. But he’s wrong; some non-artistic people do make their careers and their lives into art; the term should be used for them. And it should be a social goal, something to be sought after by everyone. <\/p>\n
The \u201creal artists\u201d serve us by setting this standard. They do society a great favor by chasing an ineffable vision, and impossible dream. They give the rest of us some outline of what that \u201cpure essence of being\u201d is. The few outside their world who read their message and live their own lives with passion and virtue and self-actualization deserve to be acknowledged as being \u201cartists\u201d, in the truest sense.<\/p>\n
IMHO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night the local Socrates Cafe group struggled over the nature of art. The specific question was whether \u201cart\u201d is confined to what artists do when practicing what is generally accepted as an \u201cart form\u201d (i.e., music, painting, sculpture, acting, etc.); or whether it is legitimate to say that \u201cart\u201d applies to other human endeavors, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1859"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1859"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1860,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1859\/revisions\/1860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}