Insight in Art

Samuel Johnson once said that it is a mark of a civilisation how it spends its leisure time. The early Victorian expansion of art galleries, by private philanthropists, associations and public institutions, was driven by the assumption that opening up art to all would educate, ennoble and civilise. Even in our sceptical age we spend large amounts of public and private money on art galleries, exhibitions and installations and people flock to many of them. Why? The pleasures beauty affords are not to be underestimated, but many other activities afford as much pleasure and involve less time, effort and money. So what motivates the high regard in which we hold good or great art? Looking at art tests us, stretches us, deepens our inner lives and cultivates insight into both ourselves and the world. Paul Auster’s novel Moon Palace in part relates the struggles of a painter, Effing, to grasp how he fits into the world and understand his own nature. In a central scene he’s painting out in the desert, alone, and is suddenly subject to an artistic epiphany:

The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things. ¹

We’ve seen that an artist’s attempts at self-expression, revelation and imaginative vision are important independently of and prior to our experience. But the point here is that looking at good or great works, which are the upshot of such artistic struggles, can enable us to explore ways of seeing the world and understanding ourselves. It is not the only one, true purpose of art to do so. Works can be good or great just in virtue of their beauty or artistic originality. But if that were all there were to art then it would remain puzzling as to why we value art so highly. The answer lies in the ways in which art works can cultivate insight, understanding and ways of seeing the world. The challenge is to show how such matters connect with a work’s artistic value and the ways in which we can learn from art works.