Art Is Unnecessary
Our two most recent blog posts explored the purposes of art. In the first, I argued that reading and writing poetry can train our capacities for sustained attention in an increasingly frenetic culture. In the second, Zach Moll suggested that abstract art, in particular, helps us discover new avenues for interpreting the world and our experiences within it. Both arguments thus speak to the benefits we reap from creating or enjoying works of art.
But you could be forgiven, after reading these articles, for arriving at a false conclusion: namely, that art should be evaluated primarily in terms of its utility. That is certainly not what we mean to imply when we speak of art’s effects on our lives, however. So to round out our discussion about art’s aims and ends, the following article takes up two related tasks: first, to explain why the above conclusion is indeed false, that art should not be evaluated primarily in terms of its utility; and second, to suggest instead that art’s deepest purposes spring forth from its gratuity, from the fact that it needn’t exist at all.
Aesthetic Utility
What might it mean to evaluate art primarily in terms of its utility? Several contemporary examples come to mind.
For years the default radio station in my car has been Classical Minnesota Public Radio, a listener-supported classical music station. I am often fascinated by the radio host’s logic when persuading listeners to support the station between songs. It typically goes something like this:
Classical music is scientifically proven to help you focus.
Classical music helps you unwind after a long day.
Classical music promotes better sleep.
When we speak of art’s utility in such ways, we speak of it like a tool. By design, tools have functions, and the more efficiently they perform their functions, the more useful we deem them. Every tool is a means to an end. A good lamp lights the room ; a good pocket knife stays sharp—and in your pocket. Deliberating over effective means to specific ends is what philosophers call instrumental reason. Oddly enough, this is the kind of reasoning radio hosts often employ to “sell” classical music.
According to an instrumental view of art, I should invest in my local classical music station because the “functions” of music help resolve pain points in my life—too much stress, lack of focus, etc. Art, like a pocket knife, has utility. True enough, I guess. The problem arises when we conclude that whole works of art—paintings, novels, symphonies—are no more than market commodities to be manufactured, advertised, and sold like any other tool.
In his book Art and Faith, painter-scholar Makoto Fujimura argues that our cultural assumptions about art have been contorted by the logic of the Industrial Revolution, which sees life in terms of “bottom-line utilitarian pragmatism.” If it’s not useful, efficient, or optimizable: scrap it. Hence the City Council member who praises the vibrant local arts scene for “supporting the economy” and “creating jobs.” Hence the anxiety of every fine arts student faced with the inevitable question: “What will you do with your degree?” Within the paradigm of the Industrial Revolution, one might even feel pressure to concoct arguments for the utility of listening to a Mozart piano concerto.
Survival Value
We find a still-more drastic example of such reasoning in recent evolutionary accounts of art. Since humans retained only those traits that helped them procreate as they evolved, the story goes, art must have helped our ancestors attract mates or, you know, ward off deadly snakes. Scientists admit they’re still working on an airtight theory. But even if such a theory of the evolutionary origins of art was to surface, it would necessarily be a theory of art’s utility—i.e. how music, poetry, and painting had (and has?) instrumental survival value.
And so what if it does? What after all is wrong with listening to classical music to regulate one’s emotions, or painting as a means of art therapy? (Never mind what could be wrong with starting a rock band to attract “mates.”) I do not wish to deny that interacting with art may have practical upshots. I am instead concerned with conflating the realms of intrinsic and instrumental values. For what finally distinguishes a painting from a hack saw is not that one impresses my friends at dinner parties while the other cuts wood. The difference lies in how the painting alone elicits an aesthetic experience that we know to be good for its own sake—that is, good regardless of the numerous practical ends for which we may put it to use.
At least for rational beings like ourselves. When we find delight in the plot of a novel, the proportions of a sculpture, or the melody of a song, we encounter art’s intrinsic worth. We intuit that the experience is good just because, even (or especially) when it serves no obvious practical purpose beyond itself. To clarify, I am not suggesting that all art is equally valuable or beautiful or praiseworthy. I am saying that aesthetic experiences are intelligibly choice-worthy, that art—like friendship, like knowledge, like life itself—can and must be treated as its own end and not a means to some other.
I generally dislike the artsy characters in films and novels who refuse to take “real jobs” and contribute to society because they are overly absorbed with their craft. (And it hardly needs to be added that countless actual artists have led irresponsible, destructive lives.) Even so, the devout musician or painter reminds us that, while investing one’s life in art is not always practical, it is—or can be—inherently valuable. This seems to be what C.S. Lewis had in mind when he wrote that art “has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” In other words, art is unnecessary. But that may be why we need it.
Gratuity & Goodness
In the same sentence as the quote above, Lewis added that the universe, like art, is also unnecessary, “for God did not need to create.” Theologians have long drawn this conclusion from the basic premise of God’s aseity or self-sufficiency. If God is God—and so depends on nothing and no one to subsist—he does not create out of need but out of abundance, pleasure, and love. God creates freely. As a consequence, we should not be surprised by the sheer gratuity of our universe: the bewildering array of use-less lifeforms and phenomena at every level of existence and, above all, the contingency of existence itself.
To be strictly literal, the creation account of Genesis does not state that God created the world good, though that’s obviously implied. Instead, it depicts God pausing at the close of each day to behold the goodness of the world he was creating, as if to remind us that goodness was and is truly there, ingredient in the stuff of creation. Drawing on these passages, Fujimura suggests that humans mimic God’s first act of creation when they create works of art; far from setting out to build tools for fixing the world, artists tap into the abundance of existence to create something new, beautiful, or provocative, something unnecessary yet good.
Getting to Know Ourselves
In the end, we may still wonder what is truly at stake in this discussion. Why so much effort to distinguish intrinsic and instrumental reasoning? It seems to me that if we allow the language and logic of efficiency to engulf our art studios, concert halls, and publishing houses (not to mention our classrooms and homes), we will gradually surrender art as a basic component of the common good in favor of more “practical” undertakings. STEM labs. Politics. E-books. We may even, if unwittingly, come to see art as a waste of time.
And it is—in a sense. But perhaps that’s just the point we need to reach to realize that art will never justify its existence on the scales of efficiency, will never withstand the scrutiny of cost-benefit analysis. And for precisely this reason, art can usher us into realms of goodness, truth, and beauty that transcend utility and foster our well-being as humans. “Art is another way of knowing the world,” writes Fujimura. We might add that art is also a way of knowing ourselves. For it awakens us to the reality that we are the sorts of creatures whose flourishing depends on the integral goods of this world, which call out to us in every work of art worthy of the name.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Finnis, John. Natural Law & Natural Rights, Second Edition, 100-127. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Fujimura, Makoto. Art & Faith: A Theology of Making. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020.
Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1960.