Value of art

Sometimes, it seems that the value of art is purely in its entertainment aspect. I believe that this is misleading, as art has a tremendous potential to educate us about universal principles that govern various fields, particularly about human nature, which plays a role in everything we do.

These days, we have to carefully manage consumption of information, which is conveniently and constantly available to us in various forms. Since our inbound bandwidth is limited, it may seem productive to limit the consumed information to that with immediately practical value, e.g. technical and non-fiction literature, documentary movies, reportage and scientific photos, etc. However, doing so would lead to missing the potential to expand our knowledge base beyond what is necessary to function on the daily basis within our current social and professional roles. In other words, focussing only on what is immediately and obviously useful does not provide an opportunity of significant, i.e. non-incremental, learning.

Recently, I heard Brian Koppelman, who co-authored screen plays of “Rounders” and “Solitary Man,” among other hit movies, mention in an interview that the value of reading fiction, as opposite to non-fiction, is that people evolved to learn by association and metaphor. Consuming ready-to-use information is efficient for computers, but not necessarily for humans. I believe that there is some fundamental truth in this comment. Besides their entertainment value, artistic images teach us about communication. More generally, infusing information with emotional content, which is what art does, effectively transforms this information into knowledge, which is what learning is.