publications, culture & society
Why art and music are essential to the system!
Ines Imdahl
On the Meaning of Humanity in Today's World.
To get straight to the point: I am not a Covidiot. The virus and the resulting pandemic are a serious threat to us. Restrictions and protective measures are essential. The only question is how much of our humanity we permanently "sacrifice" if we don't take care of the survival of artists, painters, musicians (please feel free to add).
From a psychological point of view, how necessary are art, culture, theater, and music really? Is it pure "pleasure," pure and superfluous entertainment?
A statement right away:
Art and culture are essential emotional sustenance for humans.
Even the statement that fun and pleasure are dispensable is based on a fallacy. Children who don't play wither. From the beginning of our lives, play is a crucial driver of development. The psychologist Jean Piaget has extensively described this in his theories of cognitive development. For adults, the "entertainment" of the soul is, from a psychological point of view, "system-maintenance-relevant." For the health of the psyche, for the joy of life, and also for our performance at work.
Of course, we can hardly satisfy the necessity of emotional entertainment in the current framework. Nevertheless, art and culture are also crucial for the survival of the human – perhaps humanity itself. The French director Jacques Malaterre shows how the wise human Homo Sapiens, unlike the Neanderthal, invents agriculture, tames the first wolf, and creates an awareness of his past by telling stories with cave paintings, thus becoming a cultural creator. Based on the scientific findings of Yves Coppens and Fabrice Demeter from the Collége de France in Paris, as well as Michael Bisson from McGill University in Montreal, he even goes so far as to suggest that a culture can only maintain and survive with stories that also show themselves as forms of art. In the original sound it was said: “If you destroy the (art) works and the stories of the people… it is as if they never existed”[1]. The extinction of the Neanderthal would thus appear in a completely new light. Not the often-cited size of the brain is the “cause”, but the lack of art and culture.
Apparently, not only the psychological approach assumes that the culture of a human species needs stories, literature and art to survive.
Once it was cave painting as perhaps the simplest form of art. In our diversity of being human, there are countless other forms of art today. On the one hand, they are an expression of our soul life. No one will deny this. On the other hand, they are relief, development opportunity and humanly necessary activity form. And that for the active and participating.
The increasing depression and other forms of sadness in Corona times point to the necessity of emotional support. We must stand up for the artists, musicians, writers in this country – so that after the crisis we are still a culture and society at all. Companies, brands and products can only survive if people don't wither. Especially in the age of digitization, they need the creative, inspiring to develop. Emotional support is ultimately also the basis for our financial. For our personal and for that of the economy.
[1] Program terra X “Homo Sapiens 2: The Conquest of the World” from 27.12.2013
