The most famous expressions of it are found in the world’s great cities. But it’s also scratched in caves and carved on rock walls. And it’s also pinned beneath fridge magnets in kitchens everywhere.
Art, Marc Chagall said, must be an expression of love, or it is nothing. No doubt about it … art is really an emanation of the human soul. And that makes it transcendental.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, Art and Reality.
Art and creativity flow out of us when we’re kids. That’s maybe universal. The problem, as Picasso knew, was how to remain an artist once we grow up. Because we don’t usually. And maybe that reflects a tendency we have to reject beauty and esthetics – a rejection that ripples out into our societies and cultures. Because we don’t see art being given the value it should in our world. Art, so essential an emanation of the human soul, is irrelevant to a worldview that sees the primal force in live only in survival. From this viewpoint, the jumble of chemicals and compounds and biological processes that makes up man is moved only by the urge to multiply. Nature does not favor beauty or goodness or truth, these learned minds tell us. To them, the magnificence of creation is collapsed to the mundane formula of genetics plus time.
We sensitive human beings know that to be complete hogwash, of course. There is absolutely no survival need for artistry, but it exists in all of us … though you might be hard pressed to find it in any of my personal attempts at drawing anything.
Brazilian/Austrian psychoanalyst, Norberto Keppe, whose work we will be exploring more in our upcoming teleclass series (and just write me for more info on that and to get on the mailing list – rich@richjonesvoice.com) Keppe has declared openly that art – esthetics – is the basis of civilization and our link to the eternal transcendetnal world … and God. A far cry from survival of the fittest.
Helena Mellander is a Swedish journalist and singer who’s joined me to talk about art and reality.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Tags: art, art and society, art and culture