For 'Arts' Sake'?

But what, after all is said and done, are the “intrinsic” values of the arts? What is “art’s sake”?

A few years ago a team of researchers from the RAND Corporation, a large US policy and research institution, concluded that intrinsic benefits could be divided into three broad categories – personal (captivation and pleasure), social (expanded capacity for empathy and cognitive growth), and public (development of social bonds and expression of communal meanings)(ii). What’s most interesting about this formulation is that it moves the focus from the work of art itself – the play, painting, or poem – to the artist’s acts of engagement, imagination, empathy, cognition, reflection, and creation, or those acts of engagement, imagination, cognition, reflection, and empathy that lead an audience or a student into the world evoked by a work of art. It dispenses with “art’s” sake and recognizes that the value of the arts lies in their value to people, to students. Eric Booth, a leader in US arts education for the last thirty years, insightfully argues that the intrinsic benefits of the arts are related more to its “verbs” than its “nouns.”

It also implicitly recognizes as false the classical division between thought and feeling, which lies behind the conventional association of the arts with affect and emotion, but not cognition and thought. The subordinate place of the arts in the academic hierarchy is deeply rooted in the Platonic and Cartesian model of the mind – a hierarchy that privileges rational thought and devalues emotion and instinct. That model has, in effect, doomed arts advocates in education. But modern cognitive and neuroscience is now showing that it is utterly wrong. The mind’s rational, logical, and analytic functions are actually fully integrated with and dependent on emotional and instinctual mental operations. Making and engaging art is a superb illustration of the principle discovery of contemporary cognitive and neuroscience: that our cognitive and emotional lives are not separate domains.

(ii)McCarthy, K., Ondaatje, E., Zakaras, L., and Brooks, A., Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts RAND Corporation, 2004.

(Photo above is 'Girls playing classical music' by dcaseyphoto (creative commons)