Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Art>business

During my second trip through the university experience, I've done pretty well in my management courses. So people seem to wonder why I would pick something like Visual Arts as a major. The answer is pretty simple, art is more enjoyable than business, but there is more to my reasoning than simple enjoyment, though that should be enough.

My primary justification for taking a degree in the Visual Arts and putting my management stuff on the back burner is rooted in art's overriding importance to our species. Before their was business or any need for management beyond managing our species' food and shelter needs, there was art. Our ancestors painted on cave walls thousands of years before consumerism became the species primary reason for existence. When the cycle resets itself and consumerism is replaced by some new form of survivalism, art will be there with us, communicating our ideas, our fears, our mundane existences.

Art is a human constant, whereas business is a human affliction, and ultimately, the arts will prevail. That is not to say art will save the world, it won't, but it will survive once things have collapsed under their own weight. There are only so many resources to extract and turn into useful, everyday porducts, just as there are only so many spaces for the human animal to insert itself, but any surface, any object, can be used as a component or means of artistic expression. Even the human voice and body can function as mediums in which to work. Art is a basic human endeavor as intrinsic to our species as the pursuit of food, water, and shelter. We can live without art, but we have chosen not to for eons, even under the most Hellish of circumstances. For instance, even when denied the bare necessities of food and water, Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz, one of Nazi Germany's most notorious death camps, found ways to make art.

And the idea that modern society has no use for art is an illusion. Everywhere you look and almost every thing you interact with has some form of design aesthetic applied to it. From items as utilitarian and mundane as staplers to the iPhone to nearly every building around us, art and aesthetic design play a role. There is a designer behind every product package, marketing campaign, and advertisement we see, hear, and buy on a day-to-day basis. Art is pervasive and universal. It transcends religion, politics, nation of origin, color, creed, even mental and physical health. Art, like most things today, may be cheap and easy, but it is still being made in mountainous amounts by millions of people every single day.

So called "high" art may be lost in the wilderness, though that depends very much on where you look and what you consider to be high art, and low art may be completely commmercialized and empty, but it is still being made in vast quantities.

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Posted by Erik @ 4/22/2008 01:08:00 PM