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The Value of Art
NEWSLETTER
9/17/20262 min read
We tend to invest in what we can see. It feels “smarter” to spend money on practical needs like food in the fridge, than an emotional purchase like a pretty new mug. Maybe you even feel a bit guilty and self-indulgent for buying the pretty mug. It’s apparent what need the food fills; what’s the point of the mug?
But visible doesn’t equate to more valuable. What about the value of art? The need for art is hard to see. What need does it fill? It moves us when we may be stuck in feeling nothing. It helps us process our everyday lives when the feelings are running too big. It joins our experience to others, so that we find comfort in realizing we’re not alone.
Art might seem hard to define, like it could cover half the items we see in a day. When does a bush get turned into a topiary? When we intentionally attach meaning or feeling to its expression. When a landscaper trims a hedge back so that pedestrians can see around it, that’s done only with function in mind. But when an artist purposefully clips a shape into that same bush to express something of themselves, or in hopes of you having an experience when you see it, that’s art. It’s a means of communication, not just function.
Clothing is a unique art form, hard to recognize because it carries both function and meaning. We dress our bodies to stay warm, but also to reinforce our identity. To keep ourselves physically comfortable, and also to communicate to others where we belong.
The meaning we assign to clothing doesn’t come from ourselves alone. Not even primarily ourselves. Our understanding of style is based on an inherited vocabulary that has been built over time and is constantly evolving. The idea of spikes being tough, pink being girly, skirts being for women, and shiny clothing being fancy, is created. These have meaning to us because humans, past and present, have assigned identity to these visual components.
Whenever you intentionally style an outfit, you are feeding into the artistic flywheel of fashion. You are curating your outfit based on the shared language of fashion → you experience yourself privately in that outfit and creating meaning for yourself → then you share that outfit publicly with the world for others to make meaning → which then develops the shared language of fashion. Like so many forms of art, there is both a communal and private experience.
It makes sense that filling your fridge feels more pressing than filling your walls with paintings. An empty fridge is easy to see. But as the world grows more tech forward, many of us feel more separated from both ourselves and having a community. Rather than staring into the fridge, we’re looking out into the world searching for identity and belonging. Maybe a deprioritization of art is costing us more than we realize.
