Art is beautiful. Artists may not be.

 

Hi darling,

One thought has been bothering me for quite sometime and I thought of sharing this with you. You may or may not agree to it, but I think my arguments below are quite strong ones. 

Art and the role of it in our lives has been discussed for through the centuries by many learned people. But, I think we can all agree that art has a huge impact on us, on our mental, emotional and social moorings. How it does that, is still quite a complex question, because modern neuroscience despite making giants leaps, still does not understand completely how the human brain functions. 

Good art impacts us and that's why it is so subjective, because what has impact on you may not have impact on me. It makes us think and feel. An emotional Disney movie might make us feel a lot, while a Orhan Pamuk novel might make us think about our relationships and society at large. These are two different outcomes of being "impacted" and often in great works of art, they make us do both. In Michelangelo's David, it makes us think about how is it possible to carve human flesh and skin onto hard stone, while concurrently making us feel amazed that a fellow human being could achieve this feat. 

All that was about art, but what about the artists. 

We tend to think that since, artists create beautiful things, they must be beautiful themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The art that artists create might be beautiful, but they themselves might not be good people and this has been proved countless times by countless people. Ustad Ali Akbar Khan once said that if you love art, stay away from the artists. This is written in the book on Annapurna Devi, which I recently read and I hope you read it too. Art can help generate empathy and promote different perspectives and general understanding of what we call "the human condition", but whether we become better people is finally unto us. 

The same applies to art connoisseurs who think that if they listen to Raag Lalit in the morning and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata at night and read Shakespeare and Tagore and watch Kiarostami on the weekends, they automatically become superior human beings.

You become a better human being when you treat yourself and the people around you with empathy and understanding. 

 

I think another great example of this is nature itself, the greatest creator of art. Nature has creates so many beautiful things like the butterfly below, but it can be ruthless so many times like floods, earthquakes, cyclones, volcanoes. 

Yours, 

Dad

P.S - Open your mind's window to all forms of art, but make sure that the room is well taken care of.