The Necessity of Art

Introduction
What is art? There are many definitions that can be given to art depending on the person talking about it and by these definitions; the following questions can be answered. Why is art necessary? What does it benefit us if art is applied in our lives? What can it do for us? What is its importance? These are the questions some people think of when they hear the word art. I have learned some things in my GREATWK class especially the definition of art and how to answer these questions. To give a heads up, I got a quote from Fischer, a writer and it says:

Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognize and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it. Art in capitalist society may appear as a discrete area of leisure or luxury, but this is wholly exceptional for human society. Art was humanity’s attempt to control the world. Art and magic were the same thing: ‘The newly acquired power to grasp and control objects, to prompt social activity and bring about events by means of signs, images, and words, led him to expect the magical power of language to be infinite. (Fischer, 2012).

In relation to Fischer’s idea of why is art necessary, it is because in today’s time, more and more people often use art as a form of communication, expression, imagination, exploration and many more. Art is important in viewing things differently, and the world where we live in, in general. People, specifically, young people or the youth use art for their own creativity and expression. People use art to express what they are feeling about things which other people tries to understand what it conveys to them especially in social reality or in society, rather. One of the things why art is important in our society is that art can show how change and improvement may be brought about with a mixture of creative imagination. It may be considered as a guide to our society as well but more of that later. We will be discussing what I learned through this subject in the course of this paper.

Art and Its Importance
What is Art?
First of all, what is Art? This question had been and is still asked and at the same time answered by several human minds ever since ancient Greek philosophers had lived. Many may argue that art cannot be statically defined, in as much as that art is a very complex and dynamic term which can be proven by the drastic changes of the definition of the term over the years. To better understand its importance, we must first know its definition. Art stimulates different parts of our brains to make us laugh or incite us to riot, with a whole gamut of emotions in between. Art gives us a way to be creative and express ourselves. For some people, art is the entire reason they get out of bed in the morning. It is something that makes us more thoughtful and well-rounded humans. Art is such a large part of our everyday lives that we may hardly even stop to think about it. Art is something that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing to our eyes. For some students Art is their motivation for coming to school and an area where they have success or excel, providing an important balance in their total educational experience. These are some of the definitions of art.

Art has its own distinctive and indispensible features.
• It has the ability to convey messages and emotions;
• It is a mere combination of man’s own cognitive and creative attitudes to reality recorded in words, colours, plastic forms, or melodically arranged sound;
• It also has an ability of having profound communicative function;
• It also contains the cognitive, moral and social substance;
• It makes use of different styles like paintings and poems.

There are many definitions of art but to simply put it, art is a diverse range of human acts and what it produces. Art is created by man and man alone. It has been characterized, specifically, in terms of expression, communication and emotion. There are other values that characterize art but these 3 specifically characterize it. Another main definition of art is that it is form and content, meaning all art consists of form and content.

Form simply means the elements of art used, its design principles and the physical materials used. Content, on the other hand, is idea-based and it means that what the artist meant to portray, what the artist did portray and how we, individuals, react to both the intended and the actual messages. Additionally, content includes ways in which a work was influenced by something like politics, religion, society or sometimes even the artist’s use of hallucinogenic substances at the time it was created. All of these factors, together, make up the content side of art.

Why is Art Necessary?
Art is born of necessity to a world of imperfection. In a sense, we all live within ourselves, within our own consciousness, within our perceptions. In this simple fact of human psychology art is born. Through the arts, we have the capacity to consciously shape our perception and the perception of others. The sensations created by an art form are called aesthetics. Beauty is a part of aesthetics, but only a small part. Often the reason an artist is compelled to create has nothing to do with capturing beauty or perfection. The need to create, the creative imperative, is more primal and infinitely more subtle than the cliché of beauty. (Gregson, 2005).

There are many, different reasons why art is important. Some of those reasons were already mentioned. There are other reasons of why art is important and these are the following:

• They are languages that all people speak that cut across racial, cultural, social, educational, and economic barriers and enhance cultural appreciation and awareness.
• They provide opportunities for self-expression, bringing the inner world into the outer world of concrete reality.
• They develop both independence and collaboration.
• They make it possible to use personal strengths in meaningful ways and to bridge into understanding sometimes difficult abstractions through these strengths.
• They improve academic achievement -- enhancing test scores, attitudes, social skills, critical and creative thinking.
• They exercise and develop higher order thinking skills including analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and "problem-finding."
• They provide the means for every student to learn. (DoSomething.org, 2012).

Importance of Art as discussed in our GREATWK Course
Our GREATWK course, provided us, students, a chance to develop cognitive skills and at the same time creative skills and helped us develop our imaginations through the discussions made by our professors. Individually, it also helped me grasp the definition of Art through the works of four, not alike famous Philosophers or Artists. The course defined art through the specific works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Aristotle, Leo Tolstoy, and Frida Kahlo. Nietzsche focused more on Tragic Art through the Birth of Tragedy, Aristotle on Tragedy and Mimesis through Poetics,, Tolstoy on “What is Art” and Frida Kahlo on Visual Art through her famous paintings. The four combined and created a quadrumvirate form of definition of what art is and helped me grasp a better and scholarly perspective on what art is to me.

By the discussions made by our professors in our class, art was defined and was discussed thoroughly with the help of the specific works made by some of the greatest artists in history. It was also discussed why it is really significant in our lives. In the following sections, each of the four artists will be discussed, what is art for them and why art is necessary for us.

Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo defined Art mostly through her paintings which conveyed her biographical features to the audience. Through Visual Art, Frida freely expressed herself through the paintings, her experiences, ideas, and the significant happenings that happened in her life. One famous artist, Leo Tolstoy, who pretty much defined what art and beauty should be and composed of to be considered as real art and beauty. According to Tolstoy, art must form some kind of emotional link between the artist and his/her audience, one that emotionally affects the viewer. With respect to Kahlo, whose work represented a lot of experience and/or events within her life, it is quite very important for us viewers to know the story behind the art more than about the creator for us to understand the deeper meanings behind the figures. Tolstoy shows how the works of Frida can be considered as perfect examples of art and beauty. For Tolstoy, Art can only be considered as art only by the artist’s emotions through his/her creations, the form, and the intentions in creating such artwork. Art is considered beautiful only if the art portrays the sincerity of the artist, clearness or clarity of what the artist wants to express to his/her audience, and how the artist’s individuality is visibly shown to his/her audience.

Freidrich Nietzsche
In Nietzsche’s ideology, man is the main structure of this world. He believed that without man, life is useless and meaningless. In order to attain meaning in this world, man should live life dangerously, one of his famous lines, regardless of any consequences that may happen. He believed that there is no God and that it is through art that man may find path to becoming an ubermench.

In Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche developed an idea of art and nature using the two ancient Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as metaphors for these two fundamental principles. The Apollonian principle is most clearly expressed through the arts of painting and sculpture which, Nietzsche states are representations of the world. But these representations are fantastical in nature and, therefore, allow us to escape from the reality of the world, rather like a pleasant dream. The Dionysian principle, however, is more in touch with the cruel realities of nature and is most clearly expressed through ecstatic music and dance. It is also a form of forgetting or drunkenness. For Nietzsche, dreams represent the realm of beautiful forms and symbols, an orderly place of light and appearance. Drunkenness, on the other hand, is that state of wild passions where the boundaries between "self" and "other" dissolve. If we are to be truly human and experience any form of genuine understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. Ultimately, a person should strive to find a balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian forces.

In relation to art being a necessity in life, according to Nietzsche,
Art sustains life. Art is what makes life endurable and thus possible. Art is what make life worth living. Nietzsche depicts this through a beautiful metaphor: "Once again we may see the artistic buoyancy and creative joy as a luminous cloud shape reflected upon the dark surface of a lake of sorrow." Hence, this is another basic role of art: art as a metaphysical solace. Nietszsche, analyzing the Greek tragedy writes: "The metaphysical solace (with which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful." (Quesada, 2009).

Leo Tolstoy and Aristotle
In Poetics, Aristotle proposed that the origin of Art for the likings of Human existence was Imitation. Based from Aristotle himself, Poetry, which is a form of Art, imitates life through harmony, rhythm, and language. Tragedy is one form of poetry that deals with feelings of pity, fear and of Catharsis, or the purification of emotions. The poet is the one who serves as the writer and narrator of the tragedy who in a way in which imitates life through pity and fear. The poet is also the one who takes the recipient into a lampoon type of worldview within the tragedy. With that in mind, the recipient evokes in himself/herself the idea of criticizing the tragedy and thus recollects once again and tries to recall whether he/she really did felt pity and fear towards the tragic hero.

For Tolstoy, on the other hand, he described art and explained why art is necessary in different ways in his work entitled “What is Art?”. First, he described and explained how art can be considered as a work of art. It is based on these three:
• On the greater or lesser individuality of the feeling transmitted;
• On the greater or lesser clearness with which the feeling is transmitted;
• On the sincerity of the artist, i.e., on the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself feels the emotion he transmits. (Tolstoy, 1986).
Then he also explained why art is necessary. Art acts as a message for the viewers to see and feel. It is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man 's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.

Conclusion
In conclusion, with all the definition of art given by the artists/philosophers aforementioned, I now know how complex and dynamic art as a subject is. Art is a diverse range of human acts and what it produces. It can be something that can be expressed through individual thoughts, emotions, feelings and senses. Art evolves in a way that when expressed properly with the correct criteria used in judging if it is a work of art or not, it is transformed into creative forms through creative and cognitive skills like novels, paintings, dramas, plays, etc. Every person has its own perspective and understanding of art. There are many definitions of art. We can define art based on our own understanding and our own experience.

Art is really necessary for us because it can bring about change and improvement. We, as human beings, we are always subject to change no matter what because it is who we are and it is how we grow and improve to become better. By becoming better citizens, we can create a better society and by doing so, we can create a better world where we can live peacefully and in harmony. Art can be really important in our lives because it can be a form of communication, emotion, expression, creativity, imagination and many more. Through art, we have the capacity to consciously shape our perception and the perception of others.

Art can be considered as way to connect tragedy with our lives (Nietzsche), a way to pour out our emotions and feelings through our paintings (Kahlo), or as an imitation of one’s life (Aristotle) and that it is in our own selves how we criticize and create a life perspective based on the decisions we make that could either lead to a misfortune or contentment in life.

References
DoSomething.org. (2012). 7 reasons the arts are important. Retrieved 7 April, 2013 from http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/7-reasons-arts-are-important
Esaak, S. (2013). What is Art?. Retrieved 7 April, 2013 from http://arthistory.about.com/cs/reference/f/what_is_art.htm
Fischer, E. (2010). The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach. Retrieved 8 April, 2013 from http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/book-reviews/6012-ernst-fischer-the-necessity-of-art-a-marxist-approach Gregson, L.(2005). Is Art Necessary? Retrieved 9 April, 2013 from http://www.studionotes.org/whyart.html Quesada, J. (2009). The Role of Art in Nietzsche 's Philosphy. Retrieved 8 April, 2013 from http://jorbon.tripod.com/niet01.html Tolstoy, L. (1896). What is Art?. Retrieved 8 April, 2013 from http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r14.html

References: DoSomething.org. (2012). 7 reasons the arts are important. Retrieved 7 April, 2013 from http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/7-reasons-arts-are-important Esaak, S. (2013). What is Art?. Retrieved 7 April, 2013 from http://arthistory.about.com/cs/reference/f/what_is_art.htm Fischer, E. (2010). The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach. Retrieved 8 April, 2013 from http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/book-reviews/6012-ernst-fischer-the-necessity-of-art-a-marxist-approach Gregson, L.(2005). Is Art Necessary? Retrieved 9 April, 2013 from http://www.studionotes.org/whyart.html Quesada, J. (2009). The Role of Art in Nietzsche 's Philosphy. Retrieved 8 April, 2013 from http://jorbon.tripod.com/niet01.html Tolstoy, L. (1896). What is Art?. Retrieved 8 April, 2013 from http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r14.html