I'm going to respond to various people in this post.
hypnagogue said:
I think Artman is referring to our internal lives-- our subjective experiences. Art can serve as an effective means of communicating what is inherently a difficult thing to communicate.
I just wonder how effective it really is when you can take two intelligent people, get them to experience the same work of art for the first time, and find they come away with different impressions, different interpretations and different judgements. Not only that, but even the same person can be subjected to a work of art on two different occasions, and come away with two very different experiences. Take me, for instance. The first time I watched Andrei Tarkovsky's film,
Mirror, I thought it was a steaming pile of horse manure. The next time I watched it I was overwhelmed by its beauty and concluded that it was a very deep film. I suppose this multiplicity of interpretations is what keeps the art critics employed, but what does it do for mutual understanding? But that's the thing about emotions: they're so incredibly subjective that trying to communicate them in any form is surely an exercise in futility, unless you're talking about really simple and base emotions that Hollywood tends to trade in, like fear and lust.
But maybe I'm being unrealistically pessimistic about art's ability to communicate emotion.
pace said:
cragwolf, I think you have to get away from the objectivity and subjectivity issue. If you read up some philosophy-science you get to know that science isn't an objectivity authority either.
I would never claim that science is all objectivity, and no subjectivity. The only thing I would state without reserve is that if you're interested in finding out the truth about ourselves and the universe, the best thing we currently have for that task is science, as unreliable as it may be.
einsteinian77 said:
Art is more of a philosophical way of discovering truth. I think art picks up were science can not go in terms of truth because science is a way of understanding but it doesn't give the perspective that art can.
I have a big problem with this statement. What truths or even near-truths or even half-truths has art discovered? Name me one. Or perhaps to be less strident, let me ask this: how has art increased our understanding of the world and ourselves?
plus said:
Studying art also does not help you earn money, which is perhaps the most important part of studying.

Part of the reason I keep putting off my decision on whether to change careers and become a high school teacher (it's a steady job, after all), is because I'll have to deal with narrow-minded parents who possesses bourgeois attitudes exemplified by the opinion above. If I had children, I'd tell them to study what they wanted to study, for any reason, no justification necessary. Life is hard enough without the added burden of parental expectations. Do what you want to do, just don't harm anyone in the process.