Art has always been a strong tool used to explore the human mind and spirit and the world and to teach others about the ways in which the mechanics of the human experience work.
Through painting, sculpture, music and other arts, people have made incursions in their own minds, in order to discover the inner elements of their spirits, but also to channel other people’s experiences and to learn from them. In many cases, art is a way of making the things we cannot capture take one form or another. Art, in its every form has also had the role to teach others, and sometimes even to manipulate, about the ways in which the world works, the way in which historical events happened and more. It has even been a tool to discuss divinity and the danger of leading a life with no virtue.
For these reasons, and others, art has always had an important role in society. It was revered and applauded. Bad art was criticized either to be improved or to be eliminated. Great art was celebrated and sometimes it was at the very center of the human existence.
Easily starting with the modernist movement, who noticed that there was a rupture between people and divinity and strongly with post-modernism, which mostly denied the existence of divinity, the depth of a work of art has been lost. Catering to the vision that life is pointless, senseless and why not worthless, the adepts of the post-modernist movement have transformed art into a propaganda of anti-life. Because they had the technical tools to spread easily and because everyone can and, why not, is an artist, these works have spread out and reshaped society so strongly, that art has morphed into a different entity. Of course, adepts and lovers of classic arts, who had a hard time in post-modernist times have continued to work on high art pieces, but the low art has taken the spotlight in the mainstream.
The learning aspect of art in post-modernism has been completely lost. It has been replaced by emotions, which are a stand-in for the teaching aspect, and, more often than not, those emotions are imposed, fake emotions. Take the extremely many examples of objects that have been misplaced in exhibitions or statues that broke before they were exhibited and the positive public and critical acclaim they received as deep works of art. Art has in many instances become entertainment.
To learn about something through art means to be able to extract abstract notions through concrete examples, expressed in a symbolic, yet interpretable manner, with creativity and style.
The fact that humans have created art even in the most hard of conditions is the anthropological proof that art is not a luxury in human life, but a necessity that, along with other elements of culture, accompanies the person as a GPS does when you are out for a drive in your car.