Greg Stepanich

When it counts, the artistic impulse really does matter

Reading through a new collection of essays by Renaissance scholar Ingrid D. Rowland (From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance, just out from New York Review Books), I'm struck by the point she makes about the utility of creation.

In a well-written introduction to the essays on artists and other creative types active during the Renaissance in Italy, she nicely makes the case for the humanities, pointing out that "There is nothing more essential to us than what we carry in our minds." Wars may come and go, but what we think about, what we wonder about, what our body of thought says about us, endures.

Few things are as interesting to me as how humans transmute their experiences into art, how they reflect on what has happened to them, or dream about what they hope will happen to them, through the manipulation of words, of materials such as clay, of sounds thousands of cycles apart, arranged in a given order. Even the most modest piece of art, if it comes from an honestly arrived-at impulse, can have permanent validity.

And sometimes we really need it, as Rowland says:

"Time and again, the people we call upon to face the unfaceable are the artists, the poets, the novelists, the philosophers whose work may otherwise seem so impractical, so detached from the real business of life; the people who produce what for lack of a better word we today call culture."

Which reminds me of another quintessentially American dichotomy: For all the cheapness of a lot of pop and high culture, for all the lingering disrespect we Americans have for people whom we think live in an ivory tower, writing long poems and abstruse contrabassoon sonatas, we're absolutely drenched in the creative arts.

We not only spend a great deal of mental energy considering the ins and outs of fictional characters created by writers toiling in the fields of Hollywood and New York, we also admire people who make a great deal of money coming up with new works of art, be they episodes of CSI, a country song, or a hot new novel about the trials and tribulations of a twentysomething woman in a big city trying to make a name for herself.

Maybe it's because so much of American art is popular art, and was created out of a moneymaking impulse, that we don't recognize it for what it is. But it's art, it's everywhere in this society, and we call on it all the time. Maybe we'll acknowledge that on a deeper level someday.