The Public Value of Art

If you ask people what makes art “good,” you will get a wide array of responses. Some people care mostly about art being “deep;” some care about art being beautiful; some care that art is personal; some care about the technical proficiency involved in the artwork; some just want to look at it and be moved to some kind of emotion.

There are a lot of underlying values to all these systems of measuring art’s goodness. But the same question can be phrased in another way: What is the purpose of art? And if art has a particular purpose, can goodness be assessed in terms of how well it fulfills that purpose?

There are a lot of possible purposes for art, or ways to judge its value. The founder of our mother organization, A.C.T. International, proposes these 5, for instance:

1) Does it “Humanize”?

2) Does it reveal “Goodness”?

3) Does it express “Truth”?

4) Does it release “Beauty”?

5) Does it manifest “The Glory of GOD”?

But even all five of these are open to debate and interpretation. Who can judge yes/no for these questions?

For the most part, in our postmodern world, we’re content to say, “In your heart, you can decide the value for yourself.” And that isn’t necessarily wrong! Different art will be valued differently by different people.

But in these sorts of discussions about art, I am struck by this purpose of art that is often missing entirely from the conversation:

How does it contribute to culture?

It might be most instinctive for us to frame the purpose of art from the perspective of Western individualism; but when I look in Scripture, I see that often, art was a deliberate investment in building a culture for the whole nation of Israel.

For instance, you can see the passages about the construction of the temple; that was not just for one person to experience, but for all of Israel. The temple was artistically designed to create public, perpetual experiences that shaped their view of the world in the everyday.

Perhaps this point feels less relevant in our current culture, where religion is not necessarily part of the public identity the way that it was then; what is equivalent to ritual temple sacrifices? But, maybe because I’m in New York, which is such a center of culture-making, I think art still bears this purpose of broad, public guidance.

One of the ways I see this conversation about public purpose coming back is in the conversations around “representation” of othered people, so their stories can be heard; another is in the pressure artists often feel (not necessarily bad pressure) to “speak out” or use their work to process cultural moments, like the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, or #metoo a couple years earlier.

Taylor Swift speaks candidly about realizing she had a responsibility, as someone in the public eye; a lot of Miss Americana focuses on her wrestling with her own silence in political issues. And she is not alone; a lot of artists, even those who aren’t famous, speak about these things often. Even Amy and I had to have some conversations about if it was somehow unethical that I, a white person, was co-writing an Asian American play with her when we worked together on Motherland. (Obviously, we concluded not! But the conversation itself reveals a broader sense of responsibility than “personal expression.”)

When we are assessing the value or purpose of art, how do we factor in this collectivist perspective? the way it is in dialogue with “culture” as a whole?

Or is that beyond the individual artist to worry about? Truly, I see a lot of people paralyzed by the fear that they will do something wrong, or something that will be judged later as being wrong for one reason or another; without grace, the concept of art as something public is quite bleak.

One of the beautiful things about collaboration is that it helps your art to already be in dialogue. This is, certainly, not the only valuable way to make art–but I think it is an important one.

Who can you team up with who has a different perspective than you do? How can you learn from one another?

How does your work engage with public life?

I don’t ever expect to be famous, but I’m told this principle constantly in writing as well: Write with your audience in mind.

How, then, might you make art differently?