That title is as obnoxious as any title I’ve ever written. But, in the course of this article, I’m hoping to point out a paradox that I can’t get out of my head, and that has had quite the impact on my life. . .

I left my last job because I learned I wouldn’t be able to report on cultural/arts/entertainment stories. I only went into the journalism field so that I could specialize in these stories. So, you can imagine, this was quite a deal breaker.

Here’s what happened.

While I was still at my old job, a few months ago, I had put in a request to work the cultural beat of our newscast. I wanted to report on stories of the local art, education and festivals that celebrate the incredible culture I’ve been privileged to witness here in Western Alaska. I felt like there were so many stories to tell there and I wanted to tell them.

However (after initially saying yes to my request and securing my agreement to work) my newsroom speedily let me know that I would not be able to tell those stories. They needed me to work the science and politics beats.  Their reason was simple. I was the only reporter who could steadily contribute stories of any kind to the newscast. The politics and science stories needed to happen. The cultural stories did not. “Fluff” pieces, like a report on the local Berry Festival, for example, were not as important as getting the latest numbers of salmon running in our rivers for the public to catch or letting the public know that there had been a fire in the local convenience store. I wasn’t happy with this new deal.  These kinds of stories simply were not the topics that had led me to becoming a reporter. I turned in my notice to try my luck elsewhere.  Maybe another position would let me write those cultural stories.

I tell this charming little anecdote not to vent about what went wrong at my last job (it’s all over now. At this point I’m not even pretending not to be mad about it) but because I see things like this happening on a much wider scale. I think the importance (or lack thereof) that we place on the arts deserves a closer look.

So let’s look at some more general trends, shall we?

When a high school’s funding dips, they cut the arts programmes. It’s never the sports teams that go.  When you go to university, all those music and sculpting classes usually fall under the category of electives. You don’t need to learn how to dance the way you need to know maths and chemistry, apparently. An interest in certain art forms, such as ballet and opera, is often looked on as unbearably snobbish.  Someone who is into those arts usually carries the stigma of being hoity-toity and out of touch with the real world.  In the business world, arts and entertainment are often used as synonyms for each other. That’s as if art was always meant to be something we turned to when we wanted to wind down and relax..after the important things are done.

In all these situations, my own experience included, the arts are being treated like an afterthought.  You have to get to the important things first, and art comes afterwords because art isn’t necessary.

Is art unnecessary?

It’s an uncomfortable question to ask. We feel like we can only answer “no” or we risk dismissing the power art has to uplift, inspire, reflect, and reveal. And when we dismiss that, we dismiss all the hardworking artists who have given us so much joy.

Is art unnecessary?

Let’s be daring for a tic, and entertain the possibility that the answer is yes. Art is unnecessary.

After all, my old job had a point. Stories about the salmon runs quite literally feed the people here in my Alaskan hometown.  It’s imperative that information like that gets out to the public. Climate change affects the Arctic more drastically than anywhere else.  Climate change stories, therefore, play a vital part in letting people prepare for a shifting environment where they live and work and hunt and fish and gather. A story about a crime literally lets the public know if it’s safe to walk down the streets at night.  A story highlighting a local dance festival does none of those things.

So yeah, the arts aren’t necessary to keep you alive, safe, fed, and clothed.

But do we exist just to be living, eating, and sheltered?  Is that really all that matters to our human identity?  Are our basic needs our only needs, or can we also need something that fulfills other parts of our identity..of our potential?

The Greek philosopher Plato put it pretty damn well when he described what he called the human soul. According to him, the soul is made up of three parts. The lowest part is the appetitive part that deals with our most primal desires for food and water and shelter and sex and stuff like that.  It is a necessary part of the human identity.

But the other two parts, the parts of the soul that deal with reason and spirit (emotion in Plato’s theory) are also part of the soul.  They may not deal with those basic needs, but, according to Plato, they’re tendencies are just as vital to human nature..in fact more so, according to the philosopher, because the rational part of the soul must lead the other two.

Art deals with both of these other two parts of the soul.  Since art is fundamentally structured (no matter how loosely), we need the rational part of our soul to comprehend it.  And I don’t think I need to explain how art touches and moves the emotional side of our soul.

So, accordingly to this dangerously quick run-through of Plato’s theory of the soul, art does service parts of our identity: parts that are just as crucial as our physical appetites.

One of my favourite boys who wrote in the philosophy world, German thinker Joseph Pieper, takes it even further than Plato.

In a really dynamic essay, “The Philosophical Act”, Pieper says art accomplishes the same action as philosophy.  And philosophy, according to this theory, accomplishes one hell of an action.

According to this essay, we occupy what Pieper calls the “work-a-day world”.  This is the world where everyone is doing their jobs, teaching, governing, doctoring, soldiering, buying, and selling for the “common utility”.  The common utility is a community’s ability to meet those goal’s of eating, drinking, sheltering etc. 

Pieper presents art as something that is totally foreign to this work-a-day world.  We can’t even measure art’s traits and worth with the same measuring stick that we use to measure the traits and worth of the work-a-day world.

When we make art, (something that will never feed anyone), we transcend the work-a-day-world.   We break into a world that is bigger than the work-a-day world: a world that’s above it. We kinda put the work a day world into its place as something that is an important part of our human lives, but not the whole part of our lives. We get to see the bigger picture, so to speak.

And it’s becoming more and more important for us to see the bigger picture.  As Pieper points out in the essay, society’s idea of the common utility is becoming more and the same thing as its idea of the common good.  That is to say, we are in a place in this present day and age where we are starting to think everything good for the community must be useful.  Nothing useful is good.

Making art and transcending the work-a-day world breaks this notion that only the useful is good.  It allows us to put the useful in it’s place as a good, but not the only good.

And maybe what’s more interesting, Pieper says the questions we ask in philosophy or, the “philosophical question” “can’t be answered in a permanent or conclusive way”.  We can never come to a complete answer when we ask these questions. Yet we ask them anyway.  As we ask them, we strive towards something, an understanding of some intelligence, some greatness, some beauty, above all some wholeness, which is above our grasp, but which tantalizes us and makes us rise still further. The more we strive, the more we work towards this wholeness, the more we fulfill our potential as rational creatures, capable of thinking about more than just our stomaches. The more we become ourselves.

Pieper argues that art serves the same function.  The act of creating something, or appreciating  some art also gives us an opportunity to rise above the necessary and see what’s truly important.  It lets us take a break from the strictly necessary to contemplate what we could be, what we can do, and what we can find if we reach high enough. It gives us a break from working on the machines that are our bodies and minds, and gives us a chance, for a minute, to try and find out what those machines are for.  So. . . .

Is art unnecessary?

In the greatest of all paradoxes, art is necessary because it is unnecessary. It’s necessary because it’s something we don’t have to do, but that we can do.  There is freedom in that action.  A freedom that sinks to the core of what it means to be a human being who can choose his or her own actions. Art allows us to use our sense of rationality to comprehend beauty in orderly structures. Our sense of rationality is one of our defining traits as a human being. Maybe best of all, art allows us to wonder at what bigger picture we may be a part of.  A bigger picture wherein the work-a-day world only plays a small part.

So to answer our question: Yeah. If we want to be properly functioning human beings, it seems like art is necessary.

Image at top: Vincent Van Gogh’s Iconic The Starry Night. Photo courtesy of MoMa.