Art as Social Commentary

Abstract

Too often in our busy contemporary lives we separate the beautiful into a domain aside from our daily regimen. Art is left for aesthetes who presumably form subjective and fleeting opinions in order to maintain a discourse elevated from the practicality of the masses. Yet the presumption that art requires such a study is counter-intuitive to human experiences of the beautiful. We all share common experiences in which we are inevitably forced to pause and reflect. I will argue that the broad experience of beauty as art is a necessary and constitutive component of leading a rational life however fleeting and meaningless the realm of artistic experience may appear in Western rationality.