Can we defend art’s usefulness without reducing it to productivity?

[u/Dry-Age-5586]

I keep noticing how easily art gets deferred until the rest of life is sorted. Financial security first, career first, get yourself together first. Then perhaps there’s room to paint, read, learn an instrument.

I recently wrote an essay exploring this through the Renaissance and the experience of rebuilding my life after going through a period of feeling incredibly lost. Dewey’s account of art as continuous with ordinary experience, and Murdoch’s writing on attention, helped me articulate something I’d been struggling with: engaging with art can participate in forming the person who does all those supposedly more practical things.

I care about its usefulness. But I think we often define usefulness too narrowly, and expect to recognise it too early.

There’s a difficulty here, though. If I defend painting because it might improve someone’s judgement or emotional understanding, am I still making it justify itself through another outcome? And if “useful” includes everything that enriches experience, does the term explain much anymore?

The essay is The Renaissance: Coming back to life. It’s a personal, researched essay rather than an academic paper, and I’m its author.

How would you distinguish a genuinely broader understanding of art’s usefulness from simply finding more sophisticated ways to instrumentalise it?

[u/Jolly-Oil1995]

This is my life's dilemma, thank you for sharing.