In his timeless classic
Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote: 'I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to
pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the
coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and
have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your
creditors of an hour.'
I once heard a great thinker arguing that a painting costs more than a loaf of bread; despite that we can’t
survive on painting, yet we are willing to pay. What possess us to do such thing?
Artists endure, thus they create
Art. Art inspires doing, yet artists don’t. The great Thomas Pine wrote his
influential pamphlet Common Sense only to inspire George Washington to lead a
revolt against the British. Leo Tolstoy’s essay Kingdom of God is Within You
inspired in Gandhi the sense liberation and simplistic life style. It was
Emerson who intellectually lectured on antislavery, but Abraham Lincoln led the
armies after attending his lectures. It was Thoreau who wrote Civil
Disobedience, but Martin Luther King, Jr. championed the Civil Rights
movements.
Did Machiavelli or Milton or Sartre
lead revolutions and revolts? No, they led intellectual revolutions and
revolts; it was the job of those influenced to execute anarchy and wars.
Perhaps we buy the painting because it inspires us.
Are Artists passive? Is Art, as Mr.
Wile once described it, useless? He once said that 'A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for
its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to
be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and
so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not
part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse.’ I ask here: are
those accidentals and misuses are horrible outcomes? Is wrong of me
to pair philosophers and their written heritage with Art? Then
why would Mr. Wilde incept his masterpiece of a novel with a preface on
Art?
I possess little knowledge to answer
that.
