What is the purpose of art?

Introduction. Why have humans across history poured so much energy into creating art? And why do we derive so much pleasure from art? Camile Paglia, an art critic and philosopher, presents intriguing answers in her book Sexual Personae (1991) 👇

Paglia calls nature, the source of life as well as the environmental background to life's drama, Dionysian. Nature's chaos contains both creation and destruction. It has no morals, no goal to aim at, and no concern for human desires or suffering. Art is how mankind pushes back.

Paglia writes: "The most effective weapon against the flux of nature is art." Art has order, narrative, human agency - everything that nature mocks in her vast indifference. Paglia: "Art is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic reordering of reality."

Art is about creating order out of chaos, and not promoting a particular morality: "It is the order in morality rather than the morality in order that attracts the artist." Art's primary motivation is to filter nature's madness through a methodical prism - morality is secondary.

Nietzsche said art is "spiritualization of cruelty" - the artist cuts at and chops away natural chaos to birth man-made order. Paglia writes nature has no individual objects, just a "grueling erosion." The feminine natural world is what masculine art resists, resents, & reshapes.

Art rises from the "deranged egotism and orderliness" of the male mind. Most criminals and geniuses are men because both crime and art involve imposing one's personal masculine will on the world: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the ripper."

For Paglia, art, religion, and civilization are man's half-solutions to the eternally chaotic Dionysian nature: "Religion, ritual, and art began as one." Man casts a religious spell, sketches a painting, and erects a city wall for the same reason: to impose his vision on nature.

Art, religion, and civilization impose "a graph of marked-off spaces on nature’s continuity and flow." Paglia writes: "We have made Apollonian demarcations that function as ritual preserves against nature." Art draws boundaries on nature to make it more predictable and homely.

Paglia on women: "Physically and psychologically, they are serenely self-contained. They may choose to achieve, but they do not need it." Men, however, must "quest, pursue, court, or seize." Art is the "closest man has come to imitating" woman's procreative powers.

Bottom line. Paglia writes that art is our primal and premiere sense-making tool. Paglia: "Art reflects on and resolves the eternal human dilemma of order versus energy." Nature is "energy, ecstasy, hysteria" - art is the judgmental eye that crafts a coherent story out of it.