Great point . But maybe are a little intimidated by significant art because it demands more of the viewer or listener. The curriculum in our schools should have math oriented art classes or music oriented science classes. Music is great because it’s so mathematical. Students could learn Fourier transforms while making chill beats 😎
This is a magnificent idea. I have very little to add. I just like your idea. I have a young son and for the first time in my life am thinking about what is and isn't taught.
Also I looked at your profile and I'm glad you refuse to be owned :)
It maddens me too that no one seems to understand the function of art these days. But, sorry, no, this isn't it either. Art is not about ideas, and if you try to explain it to people that way, they will rightly reply that you don't need Bach to learn about the Fibonacci sequence.
The problem, I think, is that we look for a high cultural explanation of art when we should be looking at a small boy with his nose in a book. He is not reading for ideas. He is reading for experience. And the reason he craves experience is that he needs it to become wise and brave.
The need to become wise and brave is as basic a human need as the need to become big and strong. If we are not wise and brave, we cannot act correctly or effectively. Wisdom and bravery are survival traits. That is why we need stories. That is what stories are for. Wisdom and bravery are learned from experience, and stories give us experiences that are too expensive or dangerous to have in real life. This is why the brain rewards us with pleasure for bringing it stories.
You don't need haute cuisine to grow up big and strong, and you don't need haute art to grow up wise and brave. That is just the icing on the cake, and not everyone will have the taste for it. It's a wonderful thing for those who acquire a taste for it, but it is not haute cuisine that justifies food, and it is not haute art that justifies storytelling.
Ooo, I like your point too, I think in some ways that’s what she’s saying, but I think you’ve made an important distinction between consuming art to have a cultured perspective or for some related benefit and consuming art to grow in virtue.
Maybe it's because I'm old that I find your group of STEM friends with their scorn of art and literature foreign to me. Now my wife, the Chemist, disdained her SF loving high school nerds and favored instead the electronics club. She realized later that it was their taste in SF that she didn't like. My high school group of friends were nerds, but nerds who had practically memorized Catch-22.
I've always been a writer but one who spent 40 years as a software engineer (it paid a lot better). As a STEM guy I know I approach life and art differently from most people as I try to explain in my essay https://frank-hood.com/2023/11/17/the-madness-of-crowds/. Oddly enough it was one of those flakey classes in college called The Poetry of Rock Lyrics that taught me to really appreciate poetry. High school English had taught me to dissect a poem as if I were diagramming a sentence. It took the wild metaphors of Bob Dylan to rouse the subconscious associations in my brain and bring meaning rather than see a poem as a cipher for my right brain to decode to unlock my full appreciation even if I could always appreciate a memorable phrase.
I laugh at anthropologists and archaeologists who ascribe religious meaning to the cave paintings at Lascaux while ignoring what's staring them in the face. They're art! It may have had religious significance as well, but the most obvious thing about them is that it's art, and art has meaning, even if it's just celebrating the triumphs of the hunt.
“a doctor can save a life while an artist can only enhance it, but is there really a point in saving a life if that life is meaningless to begin with?” is a begging the question fallacy, but overall a great work! I totally agree with you, and it’s well researched! I’m for sure sending this to my friends :)
Great point . But maybe are a little intimidated by significant art because it demands more of the viewer or listener. The curriculum in our schools should have math oriented art classes or music oriented science classes. Music is great because it’s so mathematical. Students could learn Fourier transforms while making chill beats 😎
This is a magnificent idea. I have very little to add. I just like your idea. I have a young son and for the first time in my life am thinking about what is and isn't taught.
Also I looked at your profile and I'm glad you refuse to be owned :)
It maddens me too that no one seems to understand the function of art these days. But, sorry, no, this isn't it either. Art is not about ideas, and if you try to explain it to people that way, they will rightly reply that you don't need Bach to learn about the Fibonacci sequence.
The problem, I think, is that we look for a high cultural explanation of art when we should be looking at a small boy with his nose in a book. He is not reading for ideas. He is reading for experience. And the reason he craves experience is that he needs it to become wise and brave.
The need to become wise and brave is as basic a human need as the need to become big and strong. If we are not wise and brave, we cannot act correctly or effectively. Wisdom and bravery are survival traits. That is why we need stories. That is what stories are for. Wisdom and bravery are learned from experience, and stories give us experiences that are too expensive or dangerous to have in real life. This is why the brain rewards us with pleasure for bringing it stories.
You don't need haute cuisine to grow up big and strong, and you don't need haute art to grow up wise and brave. That is just the icing on the cake, and not everyone will have the taste for it. It's a wonderful thing for those who acquire a taste for it, but it is not haute cuisine that justifies food, and it is not haute art that justifies storytelling.
Ooo, I like your point too, I think in some ways that’s what she’s saying, but I think you’ve made an important distinction between consuming art to have a cultured perspective or for some related benefit and consuming art to grow in virtue.
Maybe it's because I'm old that I find your group of STEM friends with their scorn of art and literature foreign to me. Now my wife, the Chemist, disdained her SF loving high school nerds and favored instead the electronics club. She realized later that it was their taste in SF that she didn't like. My high school group of friends were nerds, but nerds who had practically memorized Catch-22.
I've always been a writer but one who spent 40 years as a software engineer (it paid a lot better). As a STEM guy I know I approach life and art differently from most people as I try to explain in my essay https://frank-hood.com/2023/11/17/the-madness-of-crowds/. Oddly enough it was one of those flakey classes in college called The Poetry of Rock Lyrics that taught me to really appreciate poetry. High school English had taught me to dissect a poem as if I were diagramming a sentence. It took the wild metaphors of Bob Dylan to rouse the subconscious associations in my brain and bring meaning rather than see a poem as a cipher for my right brain to decode to unlock my full appreciation even if I could always appreciate a memorable phrase.
I laugh at anthropologists and archaeologists who ascribe religious meaning to the cave paintings at Lascaux while ignoring what's staring them in the face. They're art! It may have had religious significance as well, but the most obvious thing about them is that it's art, and art has meaning, even if it's just celebrating the triumphs of the hunt.
This reminded me of a short story, Containment by Susan Kaye Quinn.
def art tho
“a doctor can save a life while an artist can only enhance it, but is there really a point in saving a life if that life is meaningless to begin with?” is a begging the question fallacy, but overall a great work! I totally agree with you, and it’s well researched! I’m for sure sending this to my friends :)
its art
makes me think about how intermittently in a nerdy way its STEM-art because of acts