What Is the Point of Art?

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Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a cautionary tale about what happens when we value cheap entertainment over activities like reading and reflection, activities that take work and patience and a good deal of effort to yield meaningful fruit. In a dystopian world where every wall is lined with televisions and the screen is used to distract individuals from the frailty and suffering inherent in the human condition, books are outlawed and people are burned alongside them.

Such a bleak picture of human existence may seem to be on the horizon in an age where literacy is in decline and all of us carry portable television screens in our pockets. And yet, the warnings of Bradbury and his ilk are nothing new. Indeed, screeds against the corrupting power of entertainment go as far back as Plato, and philosophers have long bemoaned the undue influence of the arts.

Augustine, for instance, reflects in Book I of his Confessions that his youthful affinity for poetry was a kind of “insanity” that diverted him from his more edifying “elementary lessons in which I learned to read and write.” And Freud notes that “the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults”—going to the theater, for instance—serves the pleasure principle by “making what is in itself unpleasurable” a means of distraction and enjoyment.

Nevertheless, Freud continues, such entertainments allow life’s fears and tragedies “to be recollected and worked over in the mind.” What may seem like an infantile return to child’s play can in fact be a means of delving deeper into “the most painful experiences” while, at the same time, allowing them to be felt “as highly enjoyable” so that, with the aid of this proverbial spoonful of sugar, we are better able to swallow the realities we find most distasteful.

Such an understanding of art tracks all the way back to Aristotle who, in his Poetics, argues that the tragic stage provides spectators with a means of purging their own pity and fear, freeing them of their inner strife by allowing them to see it worked out in the lives of fictional characters. Once such a catharsis has been achieved, Aristotle says, viewers are able to return to life better equipped to understand and cope with its pains and perplexities.

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This is certainly an apt reading of our relationship to the entertainments we invent. At a time when we are inundated with media that purports to give us a window into the lives of others—both real and fictive—it helps to explain our obsession with our screens, the compulsive fixation we feel to peer into others’ experiences. It is not that we simply turn to our devices in search of cheap distractions (though this motive cannot be discounted altogether). It is that our own lives are complicated and messy and painfully overwhelming, and we are looking for art that helps us to explain and ultimately work through our inner anguish.

An example may help to illustrate this point: In a 2016 installation commissioned for the Guggenheim, the Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu constructed an industrial size robotic arm which they programmed to wave and dance for spectators. From the base of the machine, a red cellulose fluid seeped out onto the floor around it and the robot was instructed to squeegee up the dark, sticky mess. The fluid, which resembled human blood, oozed out at an increasing rate so that the robot, which had originally had plenty of time to perform for the crowd and clean the mess, was left with less and less time to dance, eventually spending every minute mopping up the blood-like spillage.

Titled “Can’t Help Myself,” the installation garnered attention from museumgoers and the wider public alike, causing many to reflect on the inhumanity with which we program our devices. We tend to treat machines as just that—machines, made to serve our interests without any concern for their own. But just watch a video of that robotic arm trying frantically to clean the liquid pouring from its base and see if you don’t feel a pang of sympathy, a sense of outrage at the unfairness with which all of us—robots included—are thrust into a world that cares little for our wellbeing and seeks only to work us to death.

The genius of “Can’t Help Myself” is, in part, that it gives viewers more than a work of art; the robotic arm is a living entity that exists among us and forces us to question the comfortable assumptions that govern our daily lives. Seeing this once playful android reduced to an existence of mere survival, a Sisyphean life of toil without respite, accomplishes something that TV shows like Westworld never could. Unlike works of pure fiction, which keep us at a safe and comfortable distance from the problems they seek to interrogate, the installation makes those problems a part of our daily reality, an intrusion into everyday existence.

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This, of course, is what great art always does. Rather than recognizing some hard and fast distinction between the real and the imaginative, it seeks to reimagine the real and realize the imaginary. Doing so provides us with the space needed to question our sense of reality, awakening us to the artifice that makes up so much of our existence and inviting us to reflect upon how we might think our daily lives anew.

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