Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world–equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being–simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories or songs or images.
— Dana Gioia, National Endowment for the Arts Chair during Stanford University commencement address
I ran across this quote in a discussion of government sponsorship for the arts and thought it was nice and concise.
I also really like what Leo Tolstoy had to say about the necessity of art.
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movement, line, color, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling–this is the activity of art.
Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
And then George Kubler, in The Shape of Time, points out we need to study form (science) every bit as much as we need to study function (art history).
Archaeological studies and the history of science are concerned with things only as technical products, while art history has been reduced to a discussion of the meaning of things without much attention to their technical and formal organization. The task of the present generation is to construct a history of things that will do justice both to meaning and being . . . expression and form are equivalent challenges to the historian; and that to neglect either meaning or being, either essence or existence, deforms our comprehension of both.
What all that gets at is the fact that art is necessary to human existence. It’s a primal form of communication. Art is neither form nor function, but a synthesis of both, and we need art in order to explain and explore our existence. Art is every bit as important as science and technology.
red paper boat 