Purpose/utility of art

This is an old debate, and could be relegated to the "dry and dusty topics" corner.  But I hereby offer a recent experience that is somewhat relevant.

In my youth (I guess I'm still "in my youth", but at 25 my teen years feel kinda far away), I was one of those people who dislike art museums.  They tired me out and bored me.  I shuffled around and cast cursory glances at old portraits.  Sometimes I would stare really hard at one of the paintings to try to discern why someone thought it was worth calling art.  Anyway, I'm a bit rueful of that period of my life because I see that most of my disinterest was actually due to bitterness at having an extreme lack of artistic talent (I'm awful at any kind of drawing/painting, definitely don't have a natural eye for that sort of thing).  And also due to an extreme lack of effort to take it seriously.

Later I got more educated.  Once I began to learn history and place art in its cultural/historical context, I stopped complaining about it being boring.  I stopped complaining about other things, like what "is or is not" art.  Goya's May 3rd is a lot more interesting once you look at with a historical perspective.  Instead of a sad, kind of smudgy painting of guys getting shot, it says something about how Goya felt about Napoleon invading Spain and his countrymen's resistance.

At some point later that bothersome question was waived in front of my face, what is the purpose/utility of art, why spend money on it, why talk about it, why waste time teaching it, etc, etc.  You could say it's worthwhile because it brightens up your life, but let's be honest, art doesn't always brighten up your life.  Often it's trying to do quite the opposite.  It's trying to provide wake-up calls and unveil problems and expose vice and cruelty.  Satire and all that.  So what art in any of its forms does, i.e. its utility, is unique based on the form of the art.  Maybe I really am saying that art's function is based on its form.  There's probably a ton of holes in that argument, but whatever.  For the sake of time and blog space I'm moving on.

Example that has taken forever for me to get around to:

So a couple nights ago I was talking to someone and in the course of gchat conversation I used the phrase "mad world."  Which reminded me of this really sad video that someone showed me awhile ago.  So yeah, I actually have embraced a more all-inclusive view of what art is and can be.  The animation of the kiwi isn't originally put to the music of Mad World, and this version of the song is just a cover of the original Tears For Fears song.  Actually the original kiwi video has this upbeat, bouncy tuba music that transitions into freaky chimes going on.  Put into the context of what's happening in the video, I found it quite jarring and a little disturbing.  But "Mad World" is an incredible choice thematically, and the Gary Jules cover creates a somber tone better than the synthy Tears For Fears version.  Anyway... I like the video and find it interesting to think about sometimes.  I played the video on repeat for awhile on another tab while doing other things.

Later that night I was getting ready for bed in the bathroom when this fat and kinda nasty cricket squeezed itself under the door.  I saw it out of the corner of my eye and I watched it scuttle around in horrified fascination for a bit.  Then I thought to myself that I should probably just kill it and get rid of it-- my sister Ann Marie hates vermin and pests in her home and probably wouldn't want it stalking the bathroom.  I went to grab some toilet paper and dispose of the cricket, but as I turned around the chorus of "Mad World" just started floating through my head, and I thought of the poor kiwi and how he probably didn't actually want to die, but the way he went out made it worth it for him.  Not so for the cricket.  I saw nothing epic or honorable or dream-fulfilling in him/her getting squished, least of all by me.  The cricket stumbled along the edge of the bathtub, and when I moved my foot away it got all startled and bolted in the other direction, finally cowering in the corner.  A Mad World indeed.  So instead of squishing, I got a cup and a napkin and escorted the cricket outside the apartment.

Maybe I was just anthropomorphizing the cricket, and that's what made me have pity on it?  But that's just me thinking in retrospect.  I actually do know what motivated me to have mercy and set the cricket free.  Kiwi.  I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking, hey.  The kiwi died.  And he knew he was going to die and he accepted that.  So aren't you just falsely attributing your own pangs of conscience to the art?  No, because as all art is multifaceted, so the Kiwi Mad World had something in there that made me feel like the fact that he had to die was meant to be tragic, not just triumphant.  Life is sweet.  And that, my friends, is one example of the purpose/utility of art in action.