Art: A Way Into a Higher State of Existence

Reaching beyond the bounds of normal human life.

Image: billionairepost.com

There’s been a joke going around that if some mediocre artist has become famous, chances are one or both of their parents have a Wikipedia page. As an artist myself, I am no stranger to the “nepo baby industrial complex,” as making any form of art in America feels increasingly “pay to play” every day. But the joke reveals something else, something a little nicer. If human beings have the resources and the choice, they will often go into the arts.

Now, some people excuse this as a rock star mindset, where the goal is to become famous rather than talented, or that being an artist is as close to “doing nothing” as “doing something” can get. I’m sure both of those contribute, but I really do think that it is as simple as this—people want to make art, and when they can, they do. But artists occupy a strange and fragile space in Western culture right now. (Ask me how I know) We are at once members of the cultural elite, but rarely members of a capital elite. No wonder so many nepo babies, talented or not, make it big. They’re the only ones who can afford to.

As an artist, you are at once starving and snobby. You are probably working class, but so few people see what you do as work anymore. Your country sees your work, at best, as trivial, at worst, subversive and dangerous. Unless you are extremely lucky (or have wealthy parents), you will probably never be able to fully survive off of your art, but you’re looked down on if you have a day job to pay your bills. Your education system has slashed public arts funding and education, so even if you manage to produce something publicly, few people outside of the rich have been taught how to engage with it, and you’ll be labeled as pretentious and elitist.

Part of this has to do with the way that we fund the arts in America, which is to say, barely at all. If something isn’t made a consistent national priority, the worst parts of the culture war get to sink in its claws. But it also has to do with the way that we think about the arts, and what that thought pattern serves.

The pairing of art and religion

I have a real soft spot for religious art. This sometimes conflicts with my opinions about money and religion, but from the inside of mosques to liturgical music to the construction of cathedrals, I think some of the most beautiful places on Earth were built with worship in mind. Art fulfills a similar instinct to religion, which perhaps is why they pair so well. When an artist works, they are reaching beyond the bounds of normal human life. They are reaching towards something that requires a special mode of communication in order to relay it, reaching away from the mundanity of the tools we use to build our lives. Religion and spiritual connection do something similar, using the divine or transcendent as a way to enhance or connect to the mundane. No wonder so much incredible religious art has been created; it’s the same goal.

But to transcend anything artistically requires thought on the part of the artist and of the viewer/audience. It requires effort and time, a willingness to step beyond the confines of ordinary life. It requires empathy and imagination, reflection and introspection. Unfortunately, that time and effort is a luxury few people can afford, and so the desire, or at least the ability to name that desire, peters out. Art gets boiled down to entertainment, which gets cut up into bite-sized pieces of slop. We’ve poisoned ourselves with irony by taking our slop alongside droplets of “it’s not that deep, bro,” which has decayed our ability to say, “Maybe it is.”

By keeping artists siloed in poverty or exhaustion while mocking their ambitions, we’ve created an ecosystem where we have abandoned the light that art shines on our future. I think a lot these days about Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Both critical works examine the easy rise and absorption of fascism, Brecht reimagines Hitler’s rise as the rise of a Chicago vegetable gangster, and Ionesco describes the ideological slip into authoritarianism by having characters turn into beasts. Both are practically instruction manuals on how authoritarianism is allowed to ascend and flourish, but we don’t make going to the theater or reading plays a priority, much less do we encourage critical thinking about them.

Picasso’s “Guernica” makes me sick to my stomach and reminds me that the horrors of war are so far beyond the scope of human comprehension without art, but we don’t make art history a priority. The folk songs of the 20th century are a musical documentation of union and pacifist movements that gave rise to an era of solidarity, but we barely teach children to play instruments, much less investigate the history of music. We have kneecapped our ability to see beyond ourselves, to reach for something we can’t name in the literal sense, to imagine the world in a different way. It’s like we’re preparing for a dissection of human nature, but we’ve dulled the knife instead.

A way into a higher state of existence

Image: kqed.org

“Everything is literal now” is a very common complaint of mine. If a piece of art isn’t exactly what it says on the package, it’s dismissed or diminished or laughed at because “it’s not that serious, bro.” But sometimes it is. Sometimes a movie isn’t something to have on in the background while you scroll on your phone, sometimes it is a way into a higher state of existence where you exist outside of the confines of your own life. Sometimes, a painting is more than something to hang on your wall to impress women; it’s an earnest expression of an experience someone couldn’t find the words for. Sometimes someone you know writes really bad breakup poetry, or worse, learns acoustic guitar and then recites the poetry over the guitar, but that’s just because sometimes talking about it isn’t enough.

Human beings want to create. They want an outlet to explore beyond themselves, beyond the limits of what they can articulate in polite company. They want to make something, and maybe they’ll be bad at it, or good but never successful, but that doesn’t diminish the need to make art. What does diminish that need is the lack of material resources to do so, and the lack of education about how to make art, what art is, and why it matters.

I see people say, “I didn’t know I needed this,” about useless junk from Amazon, but they didn’t know they needed it until someone told them. I think art is the same thing. You’ll never know you need it until someone tells you that you do. But unfortunately, all the people who want to tell you? They’re too busy at their day jobs.