Why Art?

Dear Reader,

As I prepared this month’s journal about the necessity of art, the 5 points of report writing drummed into my head in school resurfaced. Who? What? When? Where? Why?

Who needs art? That’s easy. Anyone who has ever taken a breath. To need art is to be alive.

What is art? Experience. Opera, concert, dance, a reading, the sound of a musician practicing in her room. Sculpture, painting, finding a rock laced with minerals, the sunlight sliding behind trees at dusk.

When is art? You’ll know it whenever you lay yourself open and see, hear, feel, smell or speak it.

Where is art? In your head. At your fingertips. At the end of a journey to find it or hidden, only to jump out and startle you.

Why art? The elegant eloquent Toni Morrison (1931-1919) offered this answer.

“We go to art sometimes for safety, for a haven of order, serenity; for recognizable, even traditional beauty; for anticipation with certainty that the art form will take us past our mundane selves into a deepness where we also reside.

We go, sometimes, to art for danger; to be riveted by experiencing the strange, by understanding suddenly how uncanny the familiar really is. We go to be urged, shaken into reassessing thoughts we have taken for granted; to learn other ways of seeing, hearing. To be excited. Stirred. Disturbed.”

Art. Now.