What is Art for ?

First, art makes us positive, optimistic, hopeful. Flowers, happy people or blue skies contrast with our everyday lives and while we are watching them we do not think of the terrible catastrophes that surround us (wars, earthquakes, pandemics...). They act on us like a cure and prevent us from falling into depression.

Then, we must keep in mind that other types of paintings like those depicting sadness or pain may reassure us in the sense that they tell us that life is not a long, quiet river. Edvard Munch’s Melancholy is evidence that loneliness and distress exist and that lots of people have to put up with them, just like us. We are not alone in facing problems in our day-to-day business.

Art is also a compensation for what we are not or what we lack like tenderness or optimism for example. Art is consequently meant to counterbalance all those who are too emotional, too artistic or too intellectual and who feel that something is missing in them. We love to see what we are not familiar with because we are always looking for it. Being more balanced is also being saner.

Art makes us understand that insignificant things can be glamorous, as glamorous as models or cars that media love to praise. Grass, skies can be glamorous too. Have a look at Turner’s skies to understand that glamour can hide where you do not expect it. Remember Van Gogh’s Still Life with Baskets and Six Oranges or Marcel Duchamp’s urinal called Fountain. Art is thus giving a central role to things that really matter and does not focus on superfluous subjects.

Last, we all have seen on different occasions that art can be used for propaganda because images are often more explicit than words, but works of art do not only promote political views like Picasso’s Guernica which denounces war, they can also highlight more optimistic subjects like landscapes or a happy family and express that life can be worth living too.