A-t-on besoin d’artistes ?
(Translated to English) Do we need artists?
Taken from the art notion section of the 1996-2025 Philo Bac prompts
One might say that they are not necessary, because they don’t directly contribute to creating more food and water and all of the other bare essentials for life. Ask a starving man if he needs artists and he would say no, he needs more farmers. This is, however, quite a reductionist perspective on the human experience. One could make the same argument with respect to an accountant, or a scientist, or a software engineer. In fact, much of the advancement in our world has come because of these folks, who interface with these abstractions over our basic necessities. The inventor of the tractor may not have handed us wheat directly, but they have no doubt allowed for the production of much more food than any individual farmer in history. What is the value provided by an artist, though? I would argue that art serves much the same purpose that education does; namely, shaping one’s mind to think in a different way. The opportunity cost of an artist is that their time and effort could have been dedicated to the preexisting fields of work, to directly help others in the present. Thus, the question of whether art is necessary reduces to the question of:
Problematique: Are we, as a society, limited by execution on preexisting ideas and fields, or by exploration of different, new ideas and fields?