Scott Adams, a fairly rational-sounding man, asks whether there is some way to get a "daily beauty fix."
My point is that for years I experienced a beauty-free existence. You learn to live without beauty, and you usually don't miss it in any given moment. But I think it grinds on you over time. I assume humans are hardwired by evolution to appreciate beauty, presumably because beauty is a marker for where the food is, and where the good hiding places are, and who the healthiest mates might be.
All of this made me wonder if there's a beauty analogy to music. Music is to the ears as beauty is to the eyes. We have iPods and other music devices to fill our ears with wonderful music. Could we invent a system to give us our daily beauty fix? It's an untapped market.
As far as I'm concerned, art is something manmade that I want to look at all the time. My house is full of paintings, prints, and sculpture that I never get tired of seeing. When I need to hit the reset button, this painting does the job for me nicely.
Scott Adams is a pretty smart guy, so I expect he already knows the purpose of art and was just hoping to encourage people to think about it.
Artists roll their sensitive elitist eyes with contempt when a person looks at yet another deliberately ugly piece of art and asks "but what does it mean?" Oh, it upsets them so, the thought that these awful ignorant racist rubes think that art is supposed to have meaning! Perhaps the rubes are wondering that since the artist did not think it worthwhile to create beauty, he must be trying to express something else, and it is not clear what that is. Thus the question. Most of these artists are indignant because no one recognizes their genius or even takes them seriously. Thus, "we" "need" "social change" to ensure that they are undeservingly exalted. I love art but artists are always seconds away from a shin-kicking. (That was what we call a figurative expression, not a threat of violence by the way, in case anyone was gearing up to freak out. Don't actually kick anyone in the shin, K?)
