Life Needs Art

In Ellen Dissanayake’s essay, “Art for Life’s Sake,” she centers on the theme the title suggests, analyzing how life has progressed through the expression of art. She is right on point with her assertion that art is a pivotal part of the experience of life and “an inherent universal (or biological) trait of the human species” (1). This is why, it seems, each generation of artists tries to push against the forms of the previous. It is in human nature to want to “transform the ordinary into the extra-ordinary” (10).  Humans, unlike any other species, have a desire to find meaning, and then to create meaning out of their experiences.  Dissanayake cites the anthropological foundation of art in addition to the biological and psychological (1). Still, the examples she refers to are centered on the human need to find meaning and to create something extraordinary. Even religious art is, at its base, honoring a system of explaining the unexplainable and giving ordinary things extraordinary meaning.

Behind every “isms’” definition of art, lies Dissanayake’s thesis, that art is a fundamental component of life. Art has existed and developed alongside the existence and development of human beings. Because life is so versatile, art has become a better representation of the human experience as artistic creation has developed into a universal product. The modernists referred to this process of appreciating the entirety of art as “disinterested” (3). However, I feel that people are actually finding importance in the new art because of a greater interest in the wide variations of life. People are not accepting the same answers for the meaning of life that they did even fifty years ago, so understanding new forms of art from different culture is always going to allow for a greater understanding of life. We make art to express feelings and thoughts that cannot be expressed in any other way and so art is for life’s sake.