(Related to the previous: the_theater_defies_explanation.txt)

What is the manner in which art is good? I use here the word art in a modern sense, encompassing plays, books, movies, music, and video games (not in an old sense where it would mean craft or cunning); and also in a broad sense encompassing YouTube videos, songs you sing to yourself when you're alone, graphical patterns you appreciate, furniture, board games, and newspaper comics (which is to say, I do not exclude any sort of aesthetic creation from the category of art on account of it not being, eg, sophisticated enough. This is simply how I'm going to use the word art in this post; I do not dispute that some of the things I call art are radically greater aesthetic values than others).

Probably the main and most plausible instrumental theory of art is entertainment/experience. I have come to think of this as almost a deflationary account. Amusingly, my dad is a sophisticated and intelligent man who watches a huge amount of television and movies (so does my mom, but my mom sleeps through a lot of them so it's unclear what her exact relationship to them is), but he has this account of them. Just something to do. Hopefully, something to do and like doing!

Relatedly, some people have an instrumental theory of the value of art that is based around emotional regulation. Certainly, I think this is a common use of art. If you have a bad day, a good movie can really pick you up. The discussion of "catharsis" in tragedy seems to suggest this. Of course, someone doesn't need to have this be their full account of the value of art simply because they acknowledge it happens. But some people seem to.

Some people have a usefulness/educational account of the reason for which art is good, which has always struck me as implausible. The idea basically seems to be that art will teach you something. This is less demeaning than that phrasing might make it seem, because the thing it's trying to teach you is something mighty about the human soul or the nature of reality or society or the brilliant mind of some writer or so on. I wish to make a distinction between this and "edutainment", in part because it's very obvious what the value edutainment is explicitly aiming for is. Many people have capably skewered the very concept of edutainment, elsewhere. I think of Jonathan Blow as one of the leading proponents of this theory in the modern day, due to the number of times he has explained what he makes video games for — it's not just entertainment, and it's not just escapism: it gives you something to take with you to the rest of your life. Relatedly, Jonathan Blow makes excellent video games. (I usually think if an artist has some kind of thing they think their art is "about" it comes out richer than normal, even if they're mistaken; this may or may not be such a case.) However, I find this account implausible largely because it doesn't seem to me that you're actually learning anything with most art. If anything, you probably "learn" things that are wrong. (You can see https://gwern.net/culture-is-not-about-esthetics for an essay vaguely along these lines that has some good points, iirc.) Apparently, after reading _The Sorrows of Young Werther_ by Goethe (I have picked unimpeachably good art as my example), several young men committed imitative suicide. Whatever lesson they could have learned, they learned a fatally wrong one. And what of those who didn't kill themselves? They learned... that sometimes things are sad? I feel like I already knew that. (Maybe the guys that killed themselves didn't yet know that 🧠.) Furthermore, since fiction is fictional, and other forms of art are also artifice, the artist can (and often does, and maybe arguably *should*) "rig the thought experiment", and "teach" you things about the world that are just untrue. Love conquers all? How many divisions has the love?

(I keep putting "learn" and "teach" in scare quotes here because those terms are factive otherwise.)

Now, on this same topic, an exception could perhaps be made: if people are unaccustomed to having serious discussions about matters of substance, if their heads are too cotton and muddled to consider a matter directly, then perhaps you can slip some wisdom into their heart by way of art. This may be the case for most of human history, I'm not really sure; perhaps including now. I think it's quite likely that they are getting anti-wisdom slipped into their hearts this way as well, already. Is this subterfuge for halfwits the true and enduring ultimate end of art? I doubt it.

(Some have noted that, even when you're writing a serious work of non-fiction philosophy, the actual examples you use are often a type of fiction. "If a man fell down a well, it seems to me that would be bad" ← this is technically a form of fictional utterance, on some accounts, unless you go to the usually unnecessary trouble of locating and researching an actual man who fell down a well to make your point. But the relationship to the analysis of art is tenuous. "Imagine a guy fell down a well" is not much of a work of art. You could also make a novel-length thought experiment about some philosophical topic, but I think it's no coincidence that most books like that do a terrible job of the philosophy half of it. (Then again, this puts them in numerous company with books of non-fiction philosophy...))

By the way, you can learn a lot about society, culture, and human civilization by reading old books and watching old movies. This is how I happened upon basically my entire worldview, for better and worse. But this is basically reading them "as non-fiction"; no different from reading a history book, except that maybe you can take the authors by surprise and get them to admit some things about their society while they aren't paying attention. While this is a valuable activity (although maybe not as efficient as just reading history itself), it's not really concerned with the central focus of the art, is it? And therefore we can move on.

Anyway, the solution:

It's recently occurred to me that the correct resolution to the question of the purpose of art is not usefulness, nor really enjoyment, but in fact that creating and experiencing art is another category of good that is not dependent on the other two (although, of course, it can be traded off against the other two, by normal means). It's another inherently valuable thing, like all the other inherently valuable things we have.