The Arts Have Purpose

Does all art have a purpose?

You can’t make art up for the sake of being art that doesn’t have a meaning to the art you create. Many intelligent and prolific artisans think you can, but if you examine the examples around you you’ll find man is a lier if he believes he can create anything without a purpose. Whether you are a student of the arts, a hobbyist, or a professional designer of some sort, you make your piece of art for a specific audience with the express purpose of some message — even if the message is as sad and contradictory as “this piece of art has no message.” Even if you don’t take your art seriously, you’re at least creating it to humor one’s self (this is a purpose also).

However, one might assume that if you read into the arts with meaning some meanings are more relevant than others. Are there messages in art more noble/significant than other messages? Can a message like “I simply appreciate the natural humor in the lifestyle of prairie dogs” be less important to audiences than the message of “love is the  meaning of life?” These ultimate questions stump us, and since we don’t know the answers we assume that there is a standard or their isn’t. If our conclusion is their is no set standard because no one is authoritative to make that call, the communication within the arts looses it’s significants — we devalue the importance of this critical form of communication (the arts). Once something looses significants it looses meaning, and without meaning you’re back at square one without a purpose to your creation of art.

For the Christian worldview, meaning in all things in life is inescapable. Everything is relevant somehow. Even the most mundane detail to the shirt on your back — say, the label inscribed on the back of your neck says your wearing a shirt made in China — is something that has an impact on the whole of humanity. History is impacted. Society is impacted. You are impacted. How does the thread count in your shirt not matter — for that matter, what about where the threads come from?

Something as complex as the meaning and the whole of life is lost for non-religious people because they don’t see the point to life itself. But with a clear view of God and what He thinks about the world, and an understanding of why and how He created us, everything comes into perspective. We’re here as part of God’s masterpiece of the whole of creation and time (history). We’re here as living breathing members of His art on the canvas, so to speak, and we have the potential to reflect greatness or depravity in God’s eyes. Essentially, God is the ultimate artist and the primary audience of one. We are brush strokes for His good pleasure.

At it’s bare essence, yes, that’s what we are, and God didn’t have to make any more meaning to the whole of life than that, if He had so chosen to keep us as drones in a supernaturally, mechanically manipulated universe. However, God made man “in His own image,” and “set mankind apart from the rest of the living.” We are above all sentient and spiritual people driven to find meaning and explore meaning and the relationships of all elements of life.

Thus, we enjoy the arts. Man’s drive to express ideas and values buds out of every action. The pillars of the whole of everything that lives is glued together with the ability to communicate with all the physical senses to our spiritual essences. Harnessing an advanced form of transcending communication is one of the greatest expressions of art. To communicate well is to bring the message home with taste, stile, wit, craft.

A little art can go a long way to tell a message worth telling — great or small. And who is to say that any message is small or trite? God is the judge of that, and it is only wise to explore the meaning of both the great and small things expressed and communicated by all forms of artistic expression.