Art outside the box

 CEBU, Philippines -  Time and again we've been told that art is important in our life. At school we've been sent to an art event as part of our academic learning. At work some of us get the chance now and then to represent our office in a company-sponsored art performance.

Yet many of us do not really understand why art is supposed to be a big thing. We are tempted to think that it is mainly just a "socials" thing. When asked for comment at an art exhibit, for example, we just try to fake an intellectual line or two.

One practical benefit in going to an art event is the chance to be in community with people of a certain stature - those who are presumed to have sophisticated tastes and who are often also of high ranks in society. At least, it's good opportunity for social climbing.

Really, to be knowledgeable and appreciative of art is a premium personality trait. You're considered well-polished and well-bred if you have it in you. This is the reason why those who don't have it simply try to fake it, because it is beneficial to look the part. 

The common concept of art is, perhaps, just too academic. That it takes good training to be able understand art and appreciate it. That it is, thus, a highly specialized matter reserved only for the deep thinkers.

That's probably partly so. But this is talking about "art in a box," the kind found in art galleries, theaters and museums, that which is often hyped up to arouse curiosity or to generate some sense of eminence. It is art that looks like something that requires an access to some Da Vinci Code for it to make sense in our lives.

Art is actually a much broader realm than that. The art we see on the canvas, on the performance stage, in a sculpture, on film, or the art we feel in the notes of a song are simply an imitation of the great art that is the essential breath of life. We need not abandon our innate sensitivity to beauty simply because we are not trained enough to see the point of its replications.

If we open up ourselves, we'll find art in the sound of the wind, in the spray of the rain, in the colors of sunrise, in the melancholy of dusk. There is art, too, in the weeping of those in sorrow as in the glee of little children at play. There is even art to be found in the dull, steel-and-concrete vistas of our cities, as well as in the deafening mechanical noise that infests our modern life.

Authors Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, in their book Art as Therapy, contend that a bigger view of art "can help us with our most intimate and ordinary dilemmas, by asking: What can I do about the difficulties in my relationships? Why is my work not more satisfying? Why do other people seem to have a more glamorous life? Why is politics so depressing?"

Indeed, we need to change our collective mindset regarding art in order for it to become what it is probably meant to be in the first place - a form of therapy for us. Then the works we find in art galleries and on performance platforms will begin to propel us to new realizations about our life experience, as we become aware that those pieces are just small icons that represent the bigger beauty of life. Then art will cease to be simply "art for art's sake." (FREEMAN)