Of Art

It is this very notion of living on the periphery of life. Of making one’s bread and butter out of the spoils of society’s leisure. Where is nobility in that? In waking each day and rather than feeding or building or serving or teaching or policing or healing the world, you provide and take payment merely for your contribution to your countrymen’s decadent obsessions? What’s more, that in doing so you may well enjoy a measure more of infamy in this life and beyond for your aesthetic productions than the healers and farmers and teachers who form the real clockwork of life.

We may claim, as auteurs, to enrich the lives of those we touch either directly or through our productions. We may take solace and indeed defend our course in life by claiming to take the edges off of the world for those struggling to hold it together. We may neither show nor offer any hand in shaping the pattern of incarnate life, though we may just as surely convince ourselves that it is our vision that steadies the secular hand along the seams. Nor may we even pretend ourselves the glue which binds this pattern into a whole.

Art, that ever permeable atmosphere that is invisible to most, yet virtually rapturous to those devout enough to give it berth and accept its omniscience. It is at once the most fallible and sentient of endeavours, subject to all manner of practice and applied effort, and yet entirely unthreatened by any categorical scrutiny toward criticism. It is a pursuit considered chiefly frivolous in the wake of societal pursuits toward the sustenance and betterment of humankind; cast aside for the urgent application of medicine, construction, and public service. It is acknowledged and adored by nearly every member of civilization on a level, and yet still it is cast aside to the fringes of nominal human pursuit. It is considered a luxury of faculty, and yet remains the prime force behind our own creation according to our accepted Scripture – for it had been not science, not study, nor idle play that delivered life into the cradling bosom of the universe grand, but Art that our Father employed in Heaven.

And so it is at that great demarcation of mind and spirit in which we find perhaps the single greatest achievement of Art in all of its storied history – the cataclysm of Science’s own introspection. While it would be folly to debate the precedence of either house against the other, it can not be argued convincingly that without one present to (objectively) antagonize the other, there would arise no need for the definition of either. After all, it is scarcely worth identifying the disdain of any studious Scientist at the mere thought of approaching his work with the same flippancy toward mechanical process as employed (if the manner of pursuit can even be referred to as such!) by the Artist toward his respective craft.