Why art needs to be applied

 

Derek Sivers, who famously donated most of the proceeds from selling his first company, pointed out in an interview with Cal Newport that people should pursue a radical shift in career only if there is a concrete evidence that others would be willing to pay for the product of the intended work. He said that “Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you’re aiming to be valuable.”

Personally, for a long time, I have always been attracted to applied art – commercial photography, industrial design, architecture, etc. Even the art that doesn’t seem to be very applied on the surface, such as classical paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance masters, for example, upon closer consideration appears to be quite closely link to applications. Majority of the works of Rafael and Michelangelo were explicitly commissioned to promote the idea of Christianity and the might of the Church.

Of course, assigning a dollar figure to a piece of art is a tricky business, which is influenced by many, often irrational factors, such as fashion or political conjecture. Still, I believe there is at least a grain of rationalism in the idea that what is useful is necessarily valuable. For photographers, for example, capturing human emotions and commemorating life’s milestones is an obvious way to be useful to other people. This why, among the variety of possible niche genres, portrait and wedding photography is considered as the most straightforward way to start making money.

At the same time, I believe that in science, the idea of necessarily linking the scientific pursuit to a well-defined practical application has become overused. Often, the most significant scientific progress starts with pursuing something for pure fun or out of curiosity, without worrying whether the result could be immediately applied or even is something like this has already been done. Richard Feyman, for instance, decided to look into the dynamics of a spinning and vibrating dinner plate, as away of recapturing the excitement of his childhood scientific pursuits. Eventually, this work developed into something, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, but the connection was not obvious to him at the time.

Artists, for some reason, are expected to do things for the sake of creating itself, and the opportunity to differentiate oneself from the mainstream is to do think differently (i.e. start with the practical application standpoint). In scientific research, the current paradigm seems to be the opposite, so the logical way to go is not to follow the majority, but to do fundamental work (“deep work” in Cal Neport’s terminology) and let the applicability emerge naturally.