For me, art is life. I myself could not exist without art, music, literature, all of it. It is beautiful; it is quintessential. Plato makes the argument that only the didactic works of art would serve society best but does he consider how basic the need for human beings to create is? In my Great Monuments of Art class, we constantly discuss how fundamental creativity is to every human being. We want to create. As mentioned briefly in class, Plato's "Republic" is a recipe for a distopia and a chaotic future society. His ideas are not too far fetched from Hitler's and Stalin's ideas on art. These ruthless leaders would only keep the art that would further the nation and Plato wants to keep art the furthers humanity's progress. Art, in this sense, is only being used as propaganda.
Art has done its best to save people's lives. For example, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf who both committed suicide kept their suicidality at bay with their writing. Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker, who died at an old age, put all his sorrow and pain into his films and was able to live a full life, a painful one, but a full one.
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