Why study the arts?

by Dr. Carl Gombert

In the introduction to his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci makes a case for including painting among the liberal arts, arguing that painting is no mere mechanical art, but rather a science requiring the same rigorous intellectual training and acumen as mathematics, astronomy or any of the other sciences of the day.

Despite the reasonableness of da Vinci’s suggestion, no modern liberal arts curriculum includes the study of painting as a universal requirement, nor is there likely to be any immediate public outcry demanding art training as essential to the preparation of young people for lives of engaged citizenship. But, the critical and historical study of the fine arts – not as disciplines to be mastered, but as a broad, multi-faceted part of the human experience – is at the heart of the modern liberal arts tradition. There are a number of reasons why this is so; a few of the more compelling are that:

Understanding the arts is an essential component of literacy.

Clearly, a principal aim of education is the development of literacy – beyond the basic ability to speak, read and write – as a refined and sophisticated capacity for nuanced communication, including an understanding of symbolism, allusion, implicit meanings, historical context and significance and so on. But words are not the only medium of human communication. Galileo’s observation that nature’s book is written in the language of mathematics suggests that to understand nature, one must be both linguistically and mathematically literate. The medieval reformulation of classical ideals that we recognize as the beginning of the modern liberal arts tradition cultivated both proficiencies: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) provided linguistic proficiency while the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) supplied mathematical proficiency.

Proficiency with words and numbers though, even at the highest level and including the study of music as mathematics, is insufficient. Both visual and auditory literacy are as essential as linguistic and mathematical literacy. We are bombarded with sounds and images, and while we may naively believe, for example, that pictures are innocent, innocuous and efficient (worth a thousand words each), a fully developed visual literacy is as difficult to obtain (and correspondingly as satisfying and valuable) as any other kind of literacy. Just as it takes years to achieve true linguistic proficiency even though we are born with the capacity to hear and vocalize, so too does visual proficiency develop slowly over time and with considerable effort. Understanding how pictures and music work are essential components of a well-rounded education.

The arts remind us of the importance of play and teach us new ways to play.

Play is an essential aspect of the arts, and much of the benefit of studying art is that it encourages us to experience the world with the wonder and willingness of childhood. Much art springs from playful sources. Artists try new things. They combine the uncombined, they recycle, they borrow, they create, and they destroy. The arts allow us to explore, not just the world as it is, but how it could be, as well as worlds that exist only in imagination. The arts allow us to see the unseen and hear the unheard. They make surprising and novel connections. They give form to ideas and provide us with an endless array of models for fashioning and understanding our existence.

But play in the arts is not always easy or even fun. Some artistic play is extremely serious and exceptionally difficult. The training and discipline required of a traditional Cambodian dancer, for example, rivals that of any Olympic athlete. Or, consider Johann Sebastian Bach or John Coltrane or Jimi Hendrix who played in ways unimaginable and unavailable to most of us.

The ubiquity and antiquity of the arts in human history merit some consideration.

Every culture in every historical period has art-making traditions. From the earliest cave paintings down to the present, people have modified and decorated their environments and recorded their experience in images. They have developed special rhythmic patterns of speech and movement, told and acted stories and made music. The fact that all human societies have artistic traditions suggests that it is good for societies to do so. Most of the time the arts promote social cohesion and cooperation, and when they don’t, they often play equally valuable roles as agents of social criticism and change. Moreover, if the arts both create and inevitably reflect the spirit of the times, as the Romantics believed, the study of the arts enriches our understanding of the breadth and depth of the human experience and by showing us where we’ve been, affords some guidance in plotting a course for where we’re going.

In many ways, the arts provide the principal means by which a society enculturates the young. The arts – literature, theater, music, the visual arts, dancing and all the rest – are the means by which one understands one’s heritage. Think of how intimately bound up one’s identity can be with the songs, stories, dances and customs of the homeland. The arts mark some parts of life as more important than others. They make people, places and things sacred; indeed, what is religion without music, poetry, decoration or theater? The arts teach us what is valuable, how to live, and how to act.

The arts make life worth living.

In his final novel, Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut says that one of the plausible aims of artists is “to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.” Although Vonnegut is skeptical about how often artists have actually pulled this off, I am convinced that this is the arts’ primary importance.

The arts bring beauty into the world. They foster cooperation and are instrumental in creating and maintaining group identity. Far more often than not, the arts bring people together, and even in the infrequent instances of controversy, they make life interesting. Furthermore, the arts allow us to step outside ourselves, to suspend disbelief, to live and love and feel vicariously.

Who among us has never been moved to tears by music, or fallen in love with, or had one’s heart ripped apart by a character from a book, a play, or a movie? The arts produce heroes, heroines and villains, gods and monsters, agony and ecstasy. They explore the full range of human emotional experience – from the darkest, most terrifying corners of the human psyche to the ridiculous and the sublime. The arts sweeten our dreams and intensify our nightmares. They feed our souls, and can drive us into the bowels of Hell or deliver us into the presence of the Divine. And sometimes, they make us laugh.