Much like Snooki from the popular TV program “Jersey Shore,” I often find myself reflecting on the functional reality of art.
What is art’s purpose in the physiological world?
We as a race have an adventurous streak. We have gone to the very extremes of our world in search of answers — to the top of Everest, the deepest reaches of the rainforest, the North and South poles — and have been left wanting.
Is art our last great adventuring — our exploration of the world of humanity’s collective subconscious mind? Answering this question would require a rigorous discourse covering thousands of years of human history and development, so instead, let’s just talk about something fun like elephants.
Did I ever tell you the story about the blind men and the elephant? Well, like, there was this great big elephant and these four blind guys were wandering around the forest when they ran into it (the blind guys were in the forest because they were trying to go to Fest, but they took a wrong turn somewhere or something).
One of them grabbed the trunk and said, “Crap! A snake!” One of them felt the leg and said, “No, idiot, it’s an oak tree!” One of them touched the point of the tusk and said, “Dummkopf! It’s the French Foreign Legion! Here’s the end of one of their bayonets!” The last one didn’t say anything because all these guys in the elephant’s Kool-Aid startled it, so it stomped him to death.
I told this story to illustrate a very important point: Elephants are dangerous.
You should never grab an elephant’s trunk because then they will start losing their minds and flailing all around.
But how do we know that? Probably because somebody a very long time ago, around the time of the discovery of elephants, tried it. He grabbed the elephant’s trunk and then a few days later, they found his mangled body in a footprint (reminds me of that “The Far Side” cartoon with the “Thagomizer, named after the late Thag Simmons”).
So ever since then, it’s been transmitted to us through artistic representations of people grabbing elephant’s trunks that this is a bad thing to do. So, is that the purpose of art, or is it just another red herring?
Correlation does not imply causality: Just because life often imitates art (which is itself imitating life), that does not mean that art’s original purpose was to pass along important messages concerning the very survival of the human race.
We need more evidence than just some story I made up about blind men and elephants and people getting trampled to conclude something heavy like that.
So let’s analyze mythology, the very basis of Western art.
Mythology’s purpose is twofold (no, providing characters for Disney to make into action figures is not one).
These are: providing lessons on the “right” way to live (as determined arbitrarily by some drunk Greek guys a long time ago) and explaining the way the world came to be the way it is.
A great myth that illustrates the first purpose is that of Baucis and Philemon: Two old people were visited by weary travelers just asking for some good down-home cooking and a place to sleep, so B&P obliged.
Well, it turns out that the “weary travelers” were really Zeus and Hermes in disguise, and so they rewarded Baucis and Philemon by turning them into intertwined trees for eternity.
More often, though, we see mythological tales filled with warnings like, “Don’t feed your twin brother his own sons” and “Don’t let your wife have sex with a bull.” What does this have to do with art?
In art, we see the disobeying of many core traditions, if only because the artist wants to explore what happens when our fundamental cores break down.
And it usually turns out badly, like it did for the fourth blind man in our earlier story.
So, what can we conclude? Why, my friend, that is for you to decide. I’m still recovering from Fest.
Dallin Kelson is an English senior at UF. His column appears on Mondays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
