Why art?

            It’s odd, isn’t it, this human proclivity? While other creatures produce beauty – some birds’ nests, for instance, are outlandishly lavish – their displays strike us as purposive, not gratuitous. Darwin guessed they were competing for attention in order to propagate, so their species thrived: that makes sense.

            But why write a poem, or song, or paint a picture? To attract a mate? Artistic talent has on occasion been a turn-on – I’m thinking of the Brownings – but the opposite is more probable. A desire to make art distracts from making something useful, like money. Some artists hit the jackpot, but more pay dearly for their impulse. Composing a poem – or this paragraph – makes little practical sense.

            Art may beautify – or enlarge – or otherwise enhance the lives of others. Does that make the artist a benefactor, like a nurse or teacher? In hindsight, this may be claimed, but for most makers, art is a selfish, even antisocial compulsion. Artists make what they “have to,” the public’s taste be damned. Some poets – George Herbert or Emily Dickinson, for example – made deathless poems they never showed.

            As a career move, art often proves catastrophic. Rare the parent who hopes their kid will grow up an artist, where pain and penury await.

            It makes no sense, this making. Yet humans keep going at it. The most intelligent of the species acts the least rationally. How come?

            The question is hardly new, but we keep asking because the answer isn’t obvious. From a young age I’ve needed to compose – first music, then words. Did I fantasize an eventual audience? You bet, I still do. But it wasn’t avidity for acclaim that drove me, rather this weird imperious need, like sex or vomit. I couldn’t not. Even today I write not because I have something to say, but because I have to say something. My spirit crimps if I don’t.

            Is art a form of seduction? Arguably. Most makers seek to amuse folks whose regard they respect. I want you to love me, no two ways about it. If I fail to beguile, I know who’s at fault.

This need for friends is a stick but not my carrot. I babble because who wants to hang with a mute?  But what started me babbling in the first place – into the silence – long before I even dreamt of listeners?

            We make art, I suspect, because our experience of existence exceeds our ability to express it; and this failure taunts. We felt so much – and said so little – and that little was trite, stale, did little justice to the enormity of our emotion. AARRGH!

            T.S. Eliot got it right – albeit starchily. “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art,” he wrote,

Art, in other words, is an analogy for ecstasy. What we feel, we often say, is “beyond words.” When we fall in love, or hug a grandkid, or nuzzle a pup, or suffer a grievous loss, we are suffused with feelings beyond, well, beyond anything, you can’t imagine! How can I use words – or sounds – or colors – to convey that enormity?

            I have a granddaughter who makes pictures. Naturally her grandfather detects great talent. She gives her pictures away, but that’s not why she makes them. She makes them because she needs to, who knows why.