Editorial: art for arts’ sake

by Zach Spiering

On Mother’s Day Eve, I bought my three kids a fresh box of 24 Crayolas (too cheap to spring for the 64) and handed out blank sheets of paper. I sent them off to joyfully express their love to the woman who bore their developing bodies for nine months and has tenderly provided so much since. 

I bought her a card. 

Refrigerators around the country are covered with these hand-drawn crayon-colored expressions, this childhood right of passage. Without a doubt, my six-dollar Hallmark paled in comparison to the outpouring of love in my children's carefully constructed creations. For some reason, despite the fact that we adults have superior fine motor skills and higher levels of verbal reasoning, we insist on passing on pieces of paper full of other people’s expressions to the ones who most need to hear our heartfelt appreciation. Meanwhile, we deprive ourselves of the joy of creating something. When is the last time you took out a piece of blank paper and drew a picture for the joy of it? We’ve lost our sense of art for art’s sake.

We can probably all agree that the worst part of being an adult is paying bills. That is what I constantly threaten my children with when they start to get too big for their britches. Most of my daily activities revolve around financial production. There is my job, which takes half my waking hours. I have to get to my job, which requires keeping my car in good condition.  We organize childcare while my wife and I are at work. Then there is laundry so we have appropriate clothes for work, meals to prepare, and shopping to make each dollar stretch. There is little joy to be had in traveling, dressing or eating. Their value is consigned to their efficacy toward our financial goals. The means to many things has become the end of all things. 

In civic life, we have similarly reduced the arts to their pecuniary value. We hold an art walk to promote downtown businesses. Murals are known to boost property values. Live music brings in customers. In Joplin we are celebrating a fund-raising milestone that will allow us to build a new performing arts center that will doubtlessly be an asset to our community. While I am certain that many of the proponents of the Cornell Complex genuinely love the arts, the center is largely being promoted in the local press for its value to downtown businesses and its ability to attract talent.

What if we just want an art complex because art is good? What if we love music and performances, and think it would be fun to take our kids to a show? Do we need to define it with dollars to make it a worthwhile endeavor? We all know that art benefits us, whether we make it or just consume it. Just viewing art, studies show, increases blood flow to the brain. Creating art has been shown to reduce stress and clears the mind. Music teaches our brains’ hemispheres to communicate. The mental health benefits of art are well documented. Art makes us healthier and happier. It likely makes us smarter.

I am sure we could find a way to monetize those benefits to art as well. We could talk about how its health perks can reduce health care expenditures or something boring like that. But we would be missing the point. Art can be defined as precisely those things which we create that have no utilitarian value. A Winslow Homer painting does nothing to put food in my belly or clothes on my back. But I love it as I love the dragons my eleven year old son creates with colored pencils on the back of his school work. The dragons do not help him figure out multiplying decimals, but they do something at least as valuable. They demonstrate his humanity.

Creation, not profit is at the core of what it means to be human. Mark Rothko compares, “the man who spends his entire life turning the wheels of industry” to the one who develops art. ”[The artist] understands that man must have bread to live, while the other cannot understand that you cannot live by bread alone.” Yet for some reason our society has dubbed the industrious person sane, and admired their ambition. We have, meanwhile, turned the starving artist and the literature major into punchlines. 

There are few who would claim creativity as the fast track to success. Most budding creative ventures (including this one) are not instantly profitable. Of course, many industrial ventures are in the same boat. The ride-hailing service, Uber takes in $50 billion a year from fares but has yet to earn its shareholders a dime. And while Uber has questionable social value (its claims of reducing car ownership and congestion have proved dubious), the arts add verifiable value to both those who make them and those who enjoy them. Our city is full of talented creatives producing high quality visuals, performances, and writings. Most of them would appreciate earning a fair profit for the value they add, but they have chosen not to limit their creative output to that which can be defined on a balance sheet. They create as they were created to do, for the joy of creation. 

If creation is the essence of our humanity, then, for the joy of creation, gaze upon a painting. Don’t just let it pass before your eyes; really revel in its beauty and design. Listen to music. Don’t let music play in the background while you do some more “productive” activity; saturate yourself in the beauty of manipulated sound. For art’s sake, attend a concert or a play. Learn a new crochet stitch or how to cook a new food. Pick up that dusty saxophone you once loved to play, and by all means grab a pack of crayons and a blank piece of paper, and go make something.