Purpose of art: To entertain or change the world?

The mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras said that "numbers are the most beautiful things in the world" because they are absolutely accurate and leave no room for interpretation. He, like Platong, did not consider art important. He thought that in a utopian society there would be no art - there is no need for "meaningless exhilaration of feelings", there would be a pure intellect. In his view, poetry and theater were their opposites. If we take a step away from the big glamorous international art fairs, much less attention has been paid to the art market and life of our neighboring countries.

Whatever Lenin would not have said, he did not, in fact, follow Marx's thoughts and reasoning. What they had in common was their conviction that art was only a propaganda tool to teach people the commandments of the revolution, to teach them what to think, not how to think. The fair is still a meeting place for art lovers and a good opportunity to bring them together with artists or suitable works of art. As for sales, however, it is necessary to do information work to get rid of two myths - all works of art are expensive and there is no art market. This is seconded by the overall low exposure to the fair format, which differs from the usual exhibition.

What to look for before art painting

Formalists believed that art must be pure, that the idea of painting should be only in colors, forms, composition and rhythm. Art should not be a commentary on society or people's lifestyles. Such pure art can provide pure, ideologically neutral, aesthetic pleasure. If art had any political relevance, it would be evident in its ability to attract people from a world of economic, religious or political struggles to a world of pure aesthetics.

In capitalism, art seems to disappear as it dissolves into entertainment, becoming its elitist and luxurious sub-branch. In a small civic society, spiritual life is divided into strictly important and insignificant. The world of moral obligations and work ethic are important. What is irrelevant is the world of fools, entertainment that is justified only by one form of vacation. When you entertain yourself, you can forget about the world and yourself for a while, but it is only justified as a nap that allows you to work even harder tomorrow.

Growing up with this lifestyle, it is difficult to enjoy art that is not escapist. As a result, entertainment is considered escapist in nature: both surveyed consumers and government officials who justify their cultural policies talk mainly about how culture can be nice, healthy and stimulate the economy, "because it allows people to escape the boredom or anxiety of real life for a moment". If this is the purpose of art, then nothing distinguishes so-called art from the rest of entertainment, and thus the market tells the absolute truth about which art / entertainment is valuable and which is not. Home page to find out more about fine art fair right now.

Art asks directly

But things don't have to be that way. These attempts to reduce art to a mere tool or pastime have never completely dominated the making and consumption of art. Not all people expect art to provide them with escapist entertainment. There are those who want art that forces or entices them to look at the most difficult questions as honestly and comprehensively as possible, art that directly asks, “How should we live? Why should we live? How to define a good life? ” There are those who enjoy such anti-cabinetist art immensely. For them, consuming it forcibly is not the same as swallowing a medicine that is believed to do good, even though the taste of the medicine is reminiscent of a toilet cleaner. For them, the challenges and alarming questions that art offers enrich their existence.

Consumption as a fetish

We really need both, because the way we live now is neither very rational nor very poetic. We hate war, but the war industry is our biggest industry. We long for a long life in a healthy body, but at the same time we torment our bodies with destructive habits. We want freedom and dream of unbridled hedonism, but we enslave ourselves with endless wage labor and competition in the tandem of production and consumption.

We are talking about honesty and awareness, but at the same time we are effectively combating reality with chemical drugs, pseudo-religious fantasies and deafening entertainment, and increasing economic growth - the horse mill of production and consumption is a fetish that everyone is obliged to worship. We pretend that we can control this mill, but for some reason we are not able to slow it down, even if we can clearly see how it is depleting the natural resources on which all human existence depends more and more rapidly.