What's the point of making art anyway?

A Personal Exploration of Why We Should Make Art

 

Recently I have been working with BURNAWAY, a non-profit arts magazine, well not necessarily working, interning, and through the course of my development work there I have read many, many things.  The first couple of days I was struck by depression.  Depression because I felt that all this work goes into getting such small amounts of money, people who want to make and present art do it for so little pay off.  Payoff that worries me because I have a family to support. In defense of what we do, often time artists and those that support art form a nepotistic group.  “We are the artists, we are the ones that understand and our value is self evident,” and similar attitudes is what I was come across.  This led me to question “Why I decided to be in this position with my life?”  A lot of the art I was seeing I wasn’t interested in.  Even in making my own art, I went through a graffiti phase because I didn’t want to make stuff, I just wanted to decorate the outside.  I feel like sometimes I am wasting time when I paint.  While I really like street art, I am becoming more turned off by it.  At least this is how I feel when I am depressed about art and the whole industry.
 

So what is the point?  I’ve been wrestling with this because I know there is value in art but it was going to take some investigation to pull myself out of depression.  At the end of the second quarter of study, my finance professor showed the class a film on Vimeo, The Future of Art, and while I was plenty exhausted from studying finance and only a week away from marketing and fundraising classes, I knew this video was important and warranted future investigation.  I watched it a couple of times, but today I watched it in the daytime and actually had the energy to pay attention, and take notes!  What I brought away from the film is that the definition of art is so wide.  I’ve long been a proponent of the purpose of art is for documenting the human thought process and this is reason I am now much more enthusiastic about art because this is what the film is about.  It really explores how we are thinking now.  The communal nature of making art, how so many ideas are out there and the artist can use those ideas to explore, use the ideas, and contribute more ideas to the ether, or maybe now we call it the cloud.
 

Why I was so depressed about art before is because of the disconnect between the artist and the industry that supports him or her.  In the United States, financial rewards go to commerce.  Artists feel the need to sell, to make money, or to go looking for government support which consumes a lot of time and pays very little.  This film helped me see the value of art disconnected from this way of thinking and shows me the connection in a new way of thinking. 
 

What’s the point of making art?  Because it provides for all of humanity possibilities for the multitude of avenues one can take an idea.  This is a good justification for art writing as well, writers need to interpret and provide their interpretations for art; more ways of thinking.  The question remains, how can one make a living, support a family on this?  There are actually several different methods but I am going to endorse my favorite.  Institutions.  Galleries should could continue to sell art for decoration, but institutions need to sell the art that doesn’t make money.  The marketers, the doctors, the designers, everyone needs to have access to this art, to help them along the way with generating ideas, entertain avenues to carry their thoughts along.  The socialist in me says “taxes, taxes, taxes!” but that is not how it works in the United States.  Therefore, engage, go to galleries and museums, particularly ones that show art you can’t hang on a wall.  Artists need to welcome everyone in for no other reason than to share.  Communicating, that’s the point of making art!