Unit 3-What is art for? “Why should art be evaluated on a deeper level to appreciate humanity?”

This article, “Art for Life’s Sake”, raised a question in my thoughts: Why should art be evaluated on a deeper level to appreciate humanity? “Art is a normal and necessary behavior of human beings that like talking, exercising, playing, working…. should be encouraged and developed in everyone” (26). To some people, art appears very impractical. They don’t understand its purpose and while they may feel a given work is “interesting” or “pretty,” they fail to grasp why it moves people. Regardless of its exact form, however, art serves vital to the human spirit, using it to explore our world and the truths that more practical endeavors can sometimes obscure. Beauty in and of itself serves as undeniable testament to the importance of art. According to the article, art has transcended intellectual trends. “The eighteenth century is recognized today as having been the focal point for aesthetics” (16). This is when art became an ideology. Appreciating not only paintings and sculptures, art became was developing to evaluate principles in creations, whether abstract or straightforward, “by and for the few who had leisure and education enough to acquire [principles]” (17). All art helps the viewer see things from another person’s point of view, stressing our common human bonds as well as the ways in which our experiences differ. Works of art are now expressed as “truths of the unconscious, expressions or revelations of universal human concerns”, because of the transcendence through art in the eighteenth century (18). It has ever since developed to evaluate the unknown depths of the human mind. Much of the appreciation of art lies in interpretation.  Above all, art seeks to illuminate the human condition–these are the bumps in the road that we struggle with, these paths in life can leave us stuck, and the efforts we make to find meaning in our existence.