Destroy and keep

I'm trying to figure out what art is supposed to be. What's valuable about it for you – and for me? What is art supposed to do, anyway?  Art is undervalued by society, and, as a result, living artists are ignored and artists don't get paid fairly – given these disincentives, why do I still want to make it? What's my connection to art, in a how-do-I-and-it-fit-into-this-particular-lifetime kind of way? Why, if it's easy for me to paint fluidly, do I revolt against easiness – why is art about difficulties, for me?  I want to know these things because, because. Just... because.

If my question about resisting easy expressiveness were a fight, I'd call it "Art-and-How-and-Why-Does-the-Hand-Execute-It?"  In one corner, I'd put Fluidity, Facility and Ease. In the other corner, there'd be Imperfections, Breaks and Variations. Which corner has the good guys? The latter. Fluidity, facility and ease seem dishonorable somehow, and even make me feel uneasy. Why is this so?

I found part of the answer in Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-being, a book about healing, architecture and spaces by Esther M. Sternberq, M.D. In it, Sternberg writes that a healthy heartbeat is more chaotic than one that's near death:

"[Ary] Goldberger has shown that heart-rate variability patterns, which appear chaotic, can be analyzed mathematically and reduced to relatively simple equations. The more complex and variable a system, he pointed out, the healthier it is...

"Goldberger likes to show his lecture audiences a series of graphic patterns, and ask them to pick the one they think looks healthiest and the one that looks the sickest. Often people choose the smoothest, least variable lines, or the ones with the most regular squiggles, as the healthier patterns. Goldberger [says they're] dead wrong. He points out that the condition in which there is the least variability in heart rate is death. In death, there are no rhythms at all-the body generates only straight lines. A desirable image is one in which variability is high. There are lots of squiggly lines oscillating around the horizontal, in what appears to be a chaotic pattern. This is the image of health..."

Chaos is the signature, the essence, of life.

Just like that, art can't ever be about easiness. That works for me. Despite being viewed as an anti-survival, time-wasting exercise, art has been made by people in all eras, in all cultures. Despite society's conscious devaluation of art and living artists, I think we read art subliminally as a sign of health, an expression of who we are at our best. And so it persists.

For the fresh understanding of connections between life, health and art, and the partial answer to one of my questions, and for many other things learned, thanks to Dr. Sternberg.

You can find Esther M. Sternberg's "Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-being" at Amazon (in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions), and elsewhere, too.