I went to see Monuments
Men with my family yesterday, and was blown away by it.
Easily the best movie I've seen in a long time. It poses a question,
quite explicitly, that is the reason that it took eighty years for
that story to be told.
Is a piece of art worth a human life?
This question is posed directly to one
of the characters, and he gives his answer. But the question is
really being asked of the audience. Is a pretty swirl of paints or a
carefully crafted piece of stone really something that a person
should be asked to sacrifice themselves for?
It's an interesting question. Art is
not, pretty much by definition, a necessity for the immediate
continuation of life. Water, food, shelter, these things qualify,
but art does not. Art is what we do when there is a need for
something that nothing else can fill, but humanity goes on with that
need unfulfilled.
Another person, that is something worth
giving up one's life for. An ideal, a way of life, the righting of
an injustice, these are things for which one should sacrifice. This
is a tenet of almost every civilization that has left its mark on the
world.
So is a statue worth dying for?
Some would say (and I am one) that it
is. That a statue can represent all of those things. The life of
the artist. The ideal that the piece represents, and the ideal of
art itself. The fact that a given work of art is the crystallization
of a way of life.
Every statue, in every circumstance,
no. But the ideal of art, as realized by individual pieces, yes.
Men and women have died for these things in the past, and will do so
in the future. Their choice to make this sacrifice means that art is
worth dying for, that this part of humanity is truly a part of us,
and that, in some cases, it is more important than just being
something aesthetically appealing.
Art is the speaking of one person to
many, across time and independent of language. It is worth lives, it
is worth deaths, it is the central essence of humans being human.
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