Why Art? - Anthony Tamasi

Art is expression. Art is our culture. Our society is run by technology and ridiculously hard mathematics, but the things we enjoy in life are generally the arts at work. Music, poetry, and prose are all art, in addition to the things one would generally associate with art such as paintings, drawings, or sculpting. Artists play a huge role in our lives, whether we realize it or not. Their form of expression forms our culture, our habits. The music we listen to every morning in the car on the way to school. The short stories we read while at school. The paintings hung up on the walls to try to liven up the dullness of the workplace. These conventional artists aim to use these mediums to help enrich our lives. They feel a certain responsibility to let their experiences out through their art, and allow us to see what they have been through, how it has shaped them, and how their art will shape us, as viewers. The language arts are so subjective, as the others arts are, but even more so in my opinion. Nearly everything is a symbol, every sentence or verse chosen with such precision, especially in short stories where every word matters. Every sentence has a purpose, and is carefully chosen, which is crazy to think about when looking at a book with several hundred pages including thousands of those precisely picked sentences. I am an artist I suppose, but not in the conventional sense where I paint, draw, or create music to spread a message. I express myself in my own ways, personally through the game of basketball. Everyone is an artist in that we all express ourselves; it is just a matter of how.