What is the point of Art?

What is the purpose of art?  For me, as an artist of many forms, art is a release … a means of expression … the extension of myself.  Art is passion and grief … a stirring of   emotions.  It’s also a safe place to shout at the top of my lungs all that I feel and all that I am! 

When we create, we are free.  We have no one to answer to.  We expose to all our naked truth … reveal ourselves, completely vulnerable, yet protected by perception.  Others perceive what we create in their own way.  If they are moved in some way by our expression, they will attach their own conditioning and judgment to it and it will become part of them.

Now … what is the point of art to the viewer?  It’s not about replicating reality.  Art is about evoking certain emotions and sentiments in the brain.  The goal of art is to transcend realism and very often, images are distorted as a way to evoke emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant.  When liberated from the tyranny of realism, visual artists deliberately alter images to create reactions.

Vision is extraordinarily complex with different aspects represented in 30 different areas of the brain and different areas of the brain handle all these aspects such as color, form, movement and depth!  This means an artist can more optimally arouse all these 30 areas by moving away from reality than by replicating it, thus creating different perspectives.  And note, an image can be constant but ones perception can change. 

Some of the common unifying principles of art or the aesthetic response are: accentuating elements, extracting what is critical and presenting it in isolation, and, of course, the Metaphor. 

Art, in whatever form, creates an aesthetic response in the brain and the centers of the specific senses connect to the brain’s emotional centers.

One of my heroes, Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Distinguished Professor with the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Program at the University of California, San Diego speaks of a phenomenon called Synesthesia, a blending of the senses.  This genetic oddity was first documented by Francis Galton and is 8 times more common in artists, poets and novelists. Dr. Ramachandran believes that these Creatives are all so good at metaphor because of their ability to link seemingly unrelated ideas, concepts and thoughts, the basis of creativity.

The relevance of Synesthesia to art is that this excessive cross wiring across the brain creates ripples of activation that enables Metaphorical thinking.  It actually accentuates ones ability to be creative and think Metaphorically.  One in fifty people are Synesthetic.  That’s a lot of Creatives!