ART MAKES YOU SMART
The dictionary defines art as works produced by human creative skill and imagination. Nature is not art, but to think is to create. Imagination is nature’s exception to the rule.
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein.
Free thought is a dangerous thing. It is forbidden to interrogate the teachings of the Bible. John 1,1-14 states that “In the beginning was the word and the word was God”. It was a mandate to burn books. God is all-knowing and is the last word on everything wise, reading would be an affront. Reading even the Bible was punishable by death.
All teachers before Christ were simply table-setters and all art were graven images. Byzantine icons, were not created as art, they were instructions to an illiterate public and any deviation by the painter from the strict formula could mean death. These were dark times for artists and free thinkers.
Long before Socrates, it was accepted that truth is beauty. Scientific resolutions are esthetic in essence and artistic expressions embody scientific ramifications. I say, art appreciation produces better citizens and makes everyone better at their avocation. Art makes you smart.
The effigies in the African galleries at the New York Natural History and Metropolitan Museums were medical prescriptions imbued with an immanence aimed at a specific ailmen. They were meant to be perishable and were left out in the elements to erode naturally. Nonetheless, in their out of context setting, they still hold our attention because they express abstract ideas. It was by no accident that the discovery of African art and the theory of relativity happened at the same time as the birth of Cubism.
The hermetic aspect of creativity is a self-gratification that registers viscerally with the viewer…also in a state of isolation. It transcends analysis and is wide open for interpretation. Gene Wilder introduced Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” to Richard Pryor and was stunned at his immediate commentary and insights that revealed things that escaped Wilder’s intimate knowledge of the painting.
Art makes you smart.
