And Furthermore...

A follow-on to my last post about Creativity and Careers...

Okay I read the Harvard Paper, found here.

While interesting, it is missing a big ol' Chunk out of it - the basic Function of art. It talks a lot about art's Value, and sort of its role in society, but not its Function.

The Function of art is to communicate something.

That Something could be communicated to one person, or lots of people, or differently to everyone in the world, or only between the artist and him or herself. But art communicates.

Sometimes art doesn't communicate anything to one person, but volumes to another.

Here are some examples of what art can communicate:

1. What it was like today inside someone's head (Van Gogh)
2. What God is like (Michaelangelo, oh and a whole lot of other people)
3. A good story about a hunt or other event (Caves)
4. What emotions feel like on a deeper level - anger, sadness, joy (Beethoven)
5. How the paint is behaving today
6. Who we love
7. What a place felt like at a particular day and time
8. A historical event (Goya)
9. How light works
10. How dark works
11. Things that scare us
12. Things that make us laugh
13. Things we remember
14. How we wish the world was
15. How we wish the world wasn't
16. Ideas about space and time
... and on and on...
... in short, what it is like to be human, communicated in deep, varied ways.

That's art.