Ars Chapter 1

1

WHAT IS ART?

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?

Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one without trying to understand them?

But in the case of a painting, people have to understand.

—Pablo Picasso

B

eauty, truth, immortality, order, harmony—these concepts and ideals have

occupied us since the dawn of history. They enrich our lives and encourage us

to extend ourselves beyond the limits of flesh and blood. Without them, life would

be but a mean struggle for survival, and the value of survival would be unclear.

In the sciences and the arts, we strive to weave our experiences into coherent bodies of knowledge and to communicate them. Many of us are more

comfortable with the sciences than with the arts. Science teaches us that the

universe is not ruled purely by chance. The sciences provide ways of observing

the world and experimenting so that we can learn what forces determine the

courses of atoms and galaxies. Even those of us who do not consider ourselves

“scientific” recognize that the scientific method permits us to predict and control many important events on a grand scale.

The arts are more elusive to define, more difficult to gather into a conceptual net. We would probably all agree that the arts enhance daily experience;

some of us would contend that they are linked to the very quality of life. Art has

touched everyone, and art is all around us. Crayon drawings, paper cutouts, and

the like are part of the daily lives of our children—an integral function of both

magnet and refrigerator door. We all look for art to brighten our dormitory

rooms, enhance our interior decor, beautify our cities, and embellish our places

of worship. We are certain that we do not want to be without the arts, yet we

are hard-pressed to define them and sometimes even to understand them.

DALE CHIHULY, Fiori di Como (1998). 70' x 30' x 12'. Hand-blown glass flowers installed at the...