A MONA Moment Ok, let's get it right out into the open. Why do we need art? After all, art doesn't provide any of our basic needs: food, clothing or shelter. Or does it? It certainly is a fair question to ask.
Some people who feel ill at ease with art have told me they feel they don't have the background or qualifications to properly appreciate art; that to gain entree to art, they feel they have to have some sort of credentials. And you know, they are right. There are some prerequisites required for the enjoyment and understanding of art. Stated simply, appreciating art requires a lively interest in life, and a desire to seek the truth.
Robert Henri, one of America's greatest artists, who grew up in Cozad, Nebraska, puts it like this: "The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art. He needs no one to give him an art education; he is already qualified. He needs but to see pictures with his active mind, look into them for the things that belong to him, and he will find soon enough in himself an art connoisseur and an art lover of the first order."
And that's where the artists comes in. They are our guides down the path to discovery, to knowledge. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, in referring to poets, the artist/poet is that person "who holds us steady to a truth until we have made it our own." Who, in his quest for truth, "does not stop at facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why. . .the meadow of space was strewn with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought."
Marcel Proust, writing in his novel Swann's Way, elaborates eloquently on this subject referring to the artist/musician.
The field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard on which. . .separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the themes they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in the vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void.
Which takes me back to the original question I posed. Why do we need art, and why do we need artists? I believe that art, like food, shelter and clothing, is a fundamental requirement of life, necessary for our humanity, for our human quest for wisdom, where, in the words of our wonderful Robert Henri, "There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-post on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge."
Why Do We Need Art?
By Ron Roth
Director
Museum of Nebraska Art
