Is art necessary?
Art would not have been for Art's sake when our ancestors painted on
cave walls. It could not have been Homo aestheticus who painted inside
the Doravakkanda caves, but the early Homo sapiens, the intelligent
animal who lived in our country over 6000 years ago.
According to Prof. Raj Somadeva, these cave paintings were a mode of
communication, about their surroundings, identifying the natural
resources, like water and food and also warnings of dangers and threats.
Man would not have considered the beauty of his paintings, but only to
convey a massage to the rest of the group, for which sometimes he would
have used symbols for convenience, symbols which could have been easily
understood by his fellow men, like depicting water resources by means of
dots. Then we could use the term Homo symbolicus, to identify our early
ancestors perhaps.
These early human beings, by what-ever name we call them, would not
have suffered from the Stendhal syndrome, which is today considered as
an illness. In medical jargon it is called 'hyperkulturemia', a
psychosomatic disorder. It was the French author Henri-Marie Beyle who
in 1817 wrote in 'Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio',
"I felt a pulsating in my heart. Life was draining out of me, while I
walked fearing a fall." (The author is better known by his pen-name
Stendhal)
Early man would not have suffered from most of the modern day
illnesses then, but they could have gone mad with the beauty of nature,
and not by any imitative art created by man himself. Stendhal went crazy
with the natural beauty of Florence. Psychiatrist Graziella Magherini,
coined the term Stendhal syndrome, after studying the symptom of many
visitors to Florence.
Yet today doctors claim hyperkulturemia affects visitors to art
galleries, when they look at man-created paintings, like the woman who
threw a cup of tea on the Mona Lisa, on August 2, 2009, and the
professor of mathematics who attacked a statue of the Roman philosopher
Seneca with a hammer in 1998. This condition causes rapid heartbeat,
dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations, when an
individual is exposed to "a large amount of beauty in one place." Even
though doctors and psychiatrists try to find an illness in such
situations, the simple explanation could be that these people had only
reacted in anger and frustration about all the importance given to poor
imitations of natural beauty.
In Saddhammapatirupaka Sutta, (Samyutta Nikaya), we read that real
gold would not disappear as long as counterfeit gold does not appear.
Buddha gave this example to explain that there is disappearance of the
true Dhamma when a counterfeit of the true Dhamma has arisen in the
world. In the same way when nature is imitated in the name of Art, such
counterfeits result in the destruction of true natural beauty.
"the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was
and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature". Hamlet, III,2.
Stendhal in his novel 'The Red and the Black', says "...a novel is a
mirror carried along a high road....". Yet do we have to look in a
mirror what we can see with our naked eyes?
Plato also considered art as imitation, that art imitates the objects
and events of ordinary life, that it was more of an illusion than is
ordinary experience. The idea that art is divinely inspired, as
explained by Socrates, and later emphasized during the Renaissance,
persists till today because art became a major medium of propagation of
religious ideas. We could even say that art really contributed to the
survival of religions. Yet there is no real evidence that the earliest
surviving paintings from cave walls showed any religious ideas or had
been inspired by supernatural forces.
It was in the 19th century Europe that philosophers like Kant,
Schelling and Hegel tried to build up a philosophy of art, perhaps based
on what some of the ancient Greeks had believed. This is probably when
Homo aestheticus was born, not in pre-historic times as Ellen
Dissanayake has argued. Hegel claimed that "Art is the highest
revelation of the beautiful, that Art makes up for the deficiencies of
natural beauty, by bringing the idea into clearer light, by showing the
external world in its life and spiritual animation."
Thus Art too became a kind of religion, with the art critics as the
priests who interpreted the artistic creations. The common man was not
expected to understand or appreciate the meaning of the new Art, and had
to be interpreted and explained by the experts. Art galleries became
like places of religious worship, where visitors had to move around in
silence and soft feet, gazing with open mouths at the displayed work
which was called art.
Aesthetics as we know it today in South Asia, is what we have
inherited from the colonial masters, and we try to interpret our
historical art according to them. In our country all art work created
since the 3rd century BCE was religious, influenced by Buddhist and
Hindu religious traditions and beliefs. Even the Sihigiri frescoes would
have been drawn along religious themes, like at Ajanta. They would not
have been painted just for the beauty of the women depicted. And we do
not need art experts to explain to us paintings in our temples.
"Human beings cannot remain without art,... which is to say without
imagination that creates, appreciates, and embodies itself in art, human
beings would be far sadder, duller approximations of what they in fact
are." So says Ben-Ami Schardstein in 'Art Without Borders : A
Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity'. Semir Zeki and Mathew
Lamb, at the Institute of Neuroesthetics, based on studies of brain
scans report that "the brian responds much more extensively when natural
objects or scenes in their natural colours are viewed than when abstract
paintings are viewed."
We should ask ourselves, has art really made man happier and less
dull, than he would have been without it.
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