SOCIAL STUDIES

as said at the beginning, according to the philosopher Rand, the primary purpose, the fundamental purpose, of a work of art is but one - contemplation... "a work of art - ANY work of art," she said, "is NOT the means to any other end; it is ITSELF its own end: to SHOW, for its own sake, what the artist considers fundamentally important, and what the viewer who enjoys the work sees as an affirmation of his/her own view of life... that is what makes a work of art so PERSONAL - why one likes a work and another dislikes the same work - the affirmation or non-affirmation of the viewer's own sense of life..."... and because PERSONAL MEANS NON-SOCIAL, this requires a different manner of approaching Art than other disciplines...

to begin with, one must note that in Jane Jacobs' SYSTEMS OF SURVIVAL, she observed that there were only two ways for humans to be able to survive: to take or to trade, and that these two ways are the choices only humans make - all the rest of the animals have only the one, to take...furthermore, she showed that these evolved into two fundamentally different worldviews... while she presumed both were viable in terms of human survival, in fact they paralleled another set of fundamental worldviews - the one pointed out so forcefully by Rand: the primacy of consciousness versus the primacy of existance... the first, the essence of Platonism, with all its tribalist configurations, that consciousness is primary, that what one thinks [or presumes] determines what it is, is - not surprisingly - the groundbase giving support to the notion [first expounded by Bell in early 20th century] that something is Art simply because a supposed expert proclaimed that it is... it is also the source for the notion of Art's purpose as being for the social or tribal usage - that is, whatever the group involved says it is for, that is what Art is considered as being for...

but, as also has been noted, creativity is an act of an individual... it is by its nature a NON-SOCIAL activity... this conflict has been at the heart of artistic endeavor since before recorded history... much of this is because it has only been recently that there has come an understanding of the mind - how it operates, and its importance to the wellbeing of the person, and indeed, its nature... throughout most all of history, it has been considered something mysterious, even tho Aristotle had justly labelled it as the essence of being human... it was much simpler to accept a belief as truth, to let an authority to proclaim what was and what wasn't right - than to contemplate on one's own...