Art is not useless!
If science is the objective interpretation and understanding of reality, the art is the subjective interpretation and understanding of reality. Science if factual, descriptive, eternal until it is renewed or proven wrong. Art is personal, individual, expressive.
You can say love is a reaction of various chemicals inside your physical body; you can say the sun rises and sets because earth rotates around its axis. You can say that is how the world is, the way things work. And it will be correct. It will be factual. It will be rational, and it will have nothing to do with art.
Won’t it, now?
Art may not be accurate. It may not be factual. It may not apply to a math equation. It may be false. It may be a delusion. It may be inexplicable, sentimental, emotional, unrealistic. But it can be true. The artistic reality is just as real as the scientific reality because they are of the same reality. Just a different set of eyes, that is all.
Art is not just brushstrokes, a play with words, a vocalized melody. It is not just movements of the body, a flash of fire. Although art is all of those things.
Art is self-expression. Art is perspective. Art is identity. Art is who you are and how you see the world. That is why artistic creations are almost always extensions of your “self”. Because–it is your “self” that is materializing through a paintbrush, a pen, a conscious curve of your wrist.
How do you live in a world without art? YOU CAN’T. To live without art is to live without an identity, without self-expression, without a worldview. You don’t have to be creative to be an artist. Being an artist doesn’t need to be a conscious decision. We are all artists when we are being ourselves, when we are saying our words, acting the way we are. The way we choose certain words over others, the way we fall in love with different things, the way we dress. Each and every moment in which we are living are definitive of who we are, and are part of our self-expression.
That is why science is also an art, because if you choose to see the world from a scientific perspective, it is your perspective. It is still you. In fact, science and art are very much similar to each other. They are one and the same thing. They are about knowledge and understanding. They are pursued with passion. They seek to reinvent themselves–to be reborn, and to be seen in a new light. They seek to be understood and accepted. They come from the heart as well as the brain, and they come from being human.
Don’t judge things based on its category. Don’t divide things. Break free from these dichotomies.
Art is not useless. Art is everything. Art is science. Science is art.
(And as a random afterthought, you can say science is subjective because it is seen through the collective human eyes, and therefore it is also a perspective. It’s just been widely agreed upon, and so it becomes fact. You can totally call chemistry “alchemy”, and instead of solutions you can say you are brewing potions. How about “herbology” instead of botany? “Healing arts” instead of medicine? Come to think of it, the distinctions between scientific and magical terminology are totally interchangeable, it’s just that “fantasy” and “science” have their own genres and domains, with a known set of characteristic that define them. But did we not come up with those distinctions ourselves???? I am going to quote Thor, who says that in Asgard, science and magic are one and the same thing.)
(And that is my great epiphany of utter irrelevance after getting totally sidetracked but somewhat on topic.)
