The importance of art to society is unquestionable, even more so to fellow artists but sometimes the questions is raised, What is art for?
“We value historical information of this kind for various reasons: because we want to understand more about our ancestors and how they lived and because we hope to gain insight from these distant people and cultures. But these efforts lead back, eventually, to a single idea: that we might benefit from an encounter with history as revealed in art. In other words, the historical approach does not deny that the value of art is ultimately therapeutic—it assumes this, even if it tends to forget or dismiss the point. Hence the irony (to put it gently) of scholarly resistance to the idea of art’s therapeutic benefit. Erudition is valuable only as a means to an end, which is to shed light on our present needs.”
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