Our great metaphors of understanding revolve around sight. Light, darkness, vision, clarity, fogginess, haze, illumination, insight.

The most compelling structure for inhabitation by human thought is a vision. A picture of the landscape by which it can be navigated. A guiding far off point or destination toward which we can progress, a landmark. An ideal picture of a land or person. That is why art is so powerful and so effectively expresses our ideas and captures such vast volumes of meaning for us. It figures for us that which we seek and that by which we understand and navigate the world, where we wish to arrive, how we must get there. It shows us something to love and desire and reveals a path toward it.

In this sense, it is not arguments that compel humans, but pictures. This is, of course, a problem, as Socrates and Plato pointed out. Art can be manipulated, false visions can be created and sold. Poor pictures, poor maps, inflated or dishonest destinations. Sophistry. Illusion. You can manipulate the mechanisms by which people evaluate art if you understand them sufficiently. You can use the language of art to say whatever you wish it to say, if you’re skilled enough. If it remains untested, a vision can be terribly dangerous. So arguments are incredibly important for testing visions. But they are not very effective at embodying or communication them in ways that are compelling to humans. In this sense, cathedrals and music and the lives of the saints did far more historically to sell the vision of the Christian faith than theological treatises did, although they provided invaluable work in clarifying it and correcting it. Training the heart to love its proper objects is an essential duty of all art. Training the mind to test and judge and interpret the significance of all art is the eventual goal of all good education.

Art, education, and practice should all ultimately be unified and reinforce one another organically. Art reveals truth and inspires action through beauty and resulting love. Action pursues beauty and follows truth. Understanding tests beauty and aligns action appropriately. All three consist of a unity expressed in different dimensions of existence. And we meet them all in our own lives and proceed along them toward our desired, understood, and acted toward ends. Action being contingent and understanding requiring much work and analysis and development, the easiest first approach for many to the other two is through vision, through example, through art (both figurative and performative). That is why Plato’s ideal vision of education begins with art and ends with philosophy fulfilling and explicating the vision of that art so it can be better enacted. Since not everyone will be interested in or able to do much advanced philosophy (although we should and can all do as much as we can), art retains and does not lose it importance. Artists should be good philosophers, and criticism of art and discussion of art is an important function of an advanced society. Expectations for art should always be fairly high. The current tendency toward art that fails to contain or understand express any clear aesthetic value within itself is hard to praise. It is so unsuccessful at performing the basic duties of art that it would be hard to see it survive or have much value to most people absent eltite intervention (eltites who hold a private value structure and system for accessing the aesthetic and philosophical value of a piece). Much art today exists purely in the conceptual sphere, they are pure argument, and barely even bother with physical embodiment (and barely need to). In fact obscurity and inaccessibility of the loved object is part of their deliberate structure and value. Eschewing other avenues, they seek uniqueness, rarity, and inaccessibility as the drivers of their value, all of which are much stronger determiners of economic, rather than aesthetic, value. Sunsets and trees and human faces are beautiful, but common. Anyone can access them, many can capture them. If your desire is to inflate the value of your art, without putting in insane amounts of work, and therefore to inflate your own value as an artist (a key object, I deem), then you need to direct your efforts in other directions. Toward a project of removing your art (and yourself) from the social and economic domain of commonality and accessibility, inflating its value along the dimensions of rarity, inaccessibility, and obscurity (and therefore your own value as an artist, socially and economically).

The old idea of the artisan, who labored long in service of something great, but pervasive and accessible, to make it more evident and embodied in the world, easier to access, easier to understand, easier to love, is not a valued path by elite or academic art these days. Commercial art, that dastardly but pervasive demon, continues to haunt our society. And the low-minded masses for some reason continue to seek pictures and scenes that are pretty or lovely or beautiful, and want to visit the typical scenes of beauty such as Venice and the Grand Canyon, despite the best efforts to educate them. The unwashed masses still enjoy Captain America and Hallmark movies and Bob Ross, despite their commonality. This is, I believe a different kind of art criticism from the kind I was earlier imagining. Elitism and obscurity as containers of essential aesthetic value are an entirely different critical and value basis from that of traditional moral, philosophical, and aesthetic criticism. Hallmark movies could certainly be criticized for the quality of their artistic effort, for the moral and philosophical depth they portray and how skillfully they portray it. But that is quite different from cirticizing them simply because the thing they portray (perhaps shallowly, perhaps hamfistedly) is common and obvious (commonly loved and obviously loveable).

The need to say something new or different is more a function of a desire personal and economic aggrandizement than an obvious act of service to the beautiful, true, and good. Art does require fresh iterations of its visions for every time, as there are always more and new people and situations in which they can be and need to be expressed and articulated. Visions need to be refreshed and revitalized. But the underlying identity of what people love and what sustain and guides them changes little across the miles and across the centuries. We are still amazed and moved by the art of far flung civilizations from far off times. Because deep down we all touch something we all recognize and share in. Much of modern art is inaccessible even to the time and culture that produced it, much less people of other times and cultures. By this measure any reasonable critic of art that understands its essence would admit that the central values of this type of art are a hindrance and detriment to its essential value. But since they may increase the financial or social standing of an artist in an elite economic and ideological circle, they persist.

Finding the proper balance with art is tricky. The problems we find in art are often a matter of degree rather than approach. Art that serves nothing, or art that serves only the self is destined to be limited. But ambition can be a very strong incentive to a creative person. Their inherent desire to inhabit a unique identity can drive them to innovate. What form that takes and how much they are actually able to contribute comes down to many other factors about them. Artist tend to be somewhat unstable personalities. That just comes with the territory. Passion and an intense desire to experiment can yield amazing results, but tends to produce volatile outcomes. Society indulges artists quite a bit these days. We value (and envy) the artistic spirit more than the spirit of the artisan. But both have their place.

Art that seeks merely to repeat or retread familiar ground in a rote manner will tend to lack energy and creativity, because little thought or feeling or skill went into giving it life. Art that is merely made to serve a purpose, like the state sponsored art of Communist Russia (and also much didactic art, including a lot of mediocre religious art and particularly modern art), is merely an automaton. It only exists to parrot the message. Good art should tap the deep vital wells that drive and unite humanity and speak to us all, but it should embody them properly and uniquely and skillfully so that they live. Life is the goal of art. The unique way that purpose gives birth to being, and being reveals beauty, and beauty leads us to truth. That is the cycle of the artist, the art, and the response in the viewer.

You can accomplish the same task, artistically, by simply telling what it is you have to say. But a good artist will make it life they will embody it. They will show it to you. You won’t need to have it explained. It will come to life and tell its own story in more profound detail that you could capture in mere explanations. Good art will support the life of its being through all the layers of its artifice. All its dimensions will be aligned according to the purpose, so each reveals and reinforces the beauty and adds depth to the truths it reveals to its audience.

Thanks a does not mean that all art must be “pleasant”. But it does mean that darkness without light is empty of content or direction. The face of a sculpture of Jesus on the cross is beautiful. But it is beautiful not because he is dying, but because we feel the poignancy of seeing beauty and love overcome by cruelty and death. Chaos and misery are relatively cheap. They don’t inspire life, they don’t accrue anything on their own. They don’t grow. They don’t go anywhere. They become dull very quickly once they have eclipsed goodness and order. Art that ends in meaninglessness can have nothing further to say. I might sympathize. But if I accept your premise that all is darkness, it’s not clear why I should, as there is nowhere to go and no light to be sought. Darkness lacks texture without any light to give it dimension. Pathos requires at least the loss of something lovely.

Extreme contrasts of light and dark can serve to bring drama and to enhance contrast, to highlight the great chasms of experience that beset us. Terror and anger and sadness are powerful storytellers, but only because we suffer some state opposed to that which we desire, because we have fallen in, or because we wish to escape to something better. They inspire us to feel, to see the problems with our state, and they inspire us to act. And when they devour our happiness we see the tragedy, because something has been lost. Art that merely dwells in the depths of darkness and ugliness and rejects traditional visions of beauty becomes flat and lacks range. It has reduced the spectrum of human existence down to its least various, least lively, textured, most common, and least purpose-inhabited elements. It contains very little that is alive and growing, and depends for what life remains in it on what little beauty remains.

Amy good artist that puts in the work knows that a work of art eventually takes on a life of its own. It becomes an animated thing with its own character that other people can meet and have new encounters with. Only a poor artist makes mere maniquins, barely formed and informed by their maker, lacking in the gifts and blessings of beauty, order, and complexity, slaves to a hidden purpose that fails to inhabit them and imbue them with meaning and beauty. Art that has insufficient life to reach out to us and reveal itself does not reflect the image of the creator, who gave life. It is merely the shadow of its maker.

The greatest artist gathers whatever elements are to hand, the dust of the earth, and breathes a spark into them. A divine fire. And it animates the dust and gives light to the beholder. It reveals the contours of the universe through the energy of its being. It reveals deep shadows and bright highlights. It moves and grows. It warms the faces that gaze upon it and heats the embers of their souls, their own divine fire. It lives. And so even when the artist dies, the purpose, the beauty, the meaning it can draw from its viewers lives on. It is a conception between the artist and their materials. And a good artist, like a good parent, desires children, not puppets to merely serve or aggrandize themselves. A great artist creates something they can love.