One morning, a woman passed a street mural, a burst of color erupting on an otherwise bare concrete wall. She scarcely took a second look, swatting it away as mere painted nonsense. Several paces forward, she hesitated, reversed direction, and looked again.
Something about it—perhaps the furious woman’s eyes in the painting, perhaps the dance of light and shadow over her painted skin—halted her. Art does that. It stops us, compels us to stand still, and takes us out of our habit to remind us that life is more than function and purpose. But the tragedy is this: so many still believe that art is an accessory, a luxury, even an indulgence when in reality, it is one of man’s most natural and basic appetites.
People buy what is beautiful. No one chooses an ugly plate if they can have a better one. No one goes into a store and asks for the least ugly shirt on the rack. We’re programmed to seek beauty, but we trivialize the very individuals who make it happen. Artists—painters, writers, sculptors, musicians—are frequently called dreamers, their efforts devalued as unrealistic, their lives questioned: “What’s the point?” The irony is that even the people ridiculing them inhabit a world created by artists. The things they read, the films they watch, the music they listen to, even the design of the buildings they enter—each one of these is imagined by artistic minds.
Artists only create fiction, something in the mind that has no value in life. But is not fiction another truth? A novel is fiction, but it is a true expression of human emotions. A picture can present to us something that never was, but it can make us experience something real. Art is not lying—it is reality as described from a different perspective, another vocabulary, another point of view. If anything, art portrays truths that are normally disregarded. It reminds us of beauty not only in the magnificent and the wonderful but in the mundane—a cracked sidewalk during sundown, the sound of children’s laughter reverberating off a courtyard, the path rain etches along the surface of a weathered windowpane.
And beauty—beauty born of the heart, deep-seated—has power. It heals. It consoles. It makes existence endurable. Folks attend concerts to shed the weight of their worries. They hang paintings on their walls because viewing them brings tranquility. They resort to poetry when their hearts are shattered, and to movies when they need to feel. And even when history was blackest, there was still art. War camp prisoners etched masterpieces out of tatters, beating hopelessness with beauty. Poems penned when there was tyranny became the voices of the era. A single photo ended the war. This is not a fantasy. This is survival.
But the world continues to retain artists as ornaments, rather than necessities. School boards eliminate art classes first when budgets suffer as if imagination is something to be cut back. Parents dissuade their children from the arts for fear they will never be able to earn a living as if passion should only be pursued if it is lucrative. Governments spend on roads, bridges, and factories but refuse to spend on artists, not knowing that culture—life’s blood—is within their grasp. A nation without artists is a nation without memory, without identity, without soul.
If we deleted all the work of all the artists in the world, what would remain? No paintings, no songs, no stories, no films. Cities would be gray, walls blank, bookshelves bare. Even commercials—those ubiquitous jingles and intrusive billboards—would vanish. How hollow, how sterile a world that would be. But for all the small worth that they possess, artists persevere. They compose, they paint, and they compose music, not because they have been told to do so, but because they have to. Because there is a flame inside them that will not be put out, a light that holds on even when everyone else drops the belief that beauty must be created.
As we celebrate Arts Month, keep this in mind: artists are not only owed our applause but respect. They’re not entertainers or decorators of life. They’re architects of emotion, guardians of history, warriors of beauty. And if we knew their value, we would not just survive their presence—we would fight to make them flourish. Because at the end of the day, a world without art is not one that we would want to live in.
