The Utility of Art

Walking to the library one evening I ran into a construction crew who had chosen to use the sculptures on the library lawn as markers for their “Caution Do Not Cross” tapes. One of the construction workers had chosen to meticulously tie a knot in the form of a bow tie around the slender neck of the statue of a mother playing with her child. The rest of the cautionary tape was wrapped around the other “mother and child” abstract block of cement.

The workers could have used pillars to hold their yellow tapes but instead they chose to put some artwork to public good. It reminded me of the contempt for art that my fellow Engineers held. I went to one of the top three Engineering colleges and someone in the faculty in their infinite wisdom had decided to splurge five million dollars on a rusty scrap metal needle and oval sculpture which stood between Grainger Library and a brook called the bone yard.

Often while hurrying to and from classes we would glance at the abstract monstrosity and heap anathema on the creator and financiers. Crossing the bridge over the bone yard we would argue in favor of spending money on probes for Mars and funds for stem cell research or better grain for dolly the sheep. We would argue over the utility of art but then we would go silent for who were we elitist engineers but white-collar workers? Before I saw the taped sculptures I wondered who were engineers to question what soothed and troubled the heart of the common man? Engineering art was in the machine and the algorithm and its application towards the propulsion of free market capitalism. One day our creation will be in every house because of our machine’s utility and yet it will always be met with the indifference of the public.

The artist on the other hand would create but one ceiling and but one David and go to a million parties and a million lovers. We would create a million clones of our imaginations and be invited to no parties and would be fortunate if someone found us one wife. The world would clamor and coo over the Pieta and men would compare the beauty of their wives to the Mona Lisa only to return to curse their computers and complex VCRs. Such clichéd technology rarely brings tears to the eyes of men and usually ends up in a huge landfill. Perhaps the public’s indifference towards the engineer was the reason why we envy and covet the mysterious artist and his even more mysterious artwork.

As engineers the only art we resonated with was music. Because Bach never touched the heart of a Protestant Christian the way he touched the cardiac muscles beating behind our pocket protectors. We imagined the German’s harsh yet introspective music must have beat in synchrony with many a piston and rolled with many a jet blade.

We couldn’t make anything of the Mona Lisa. Playmates of the year stirred greater things in us than her smile. It remains enigmatic for many of us. What to make of Monroe in pastels pasted over and over again like the cans of Campbell’s soup? While studying Monroe’s movies we diagnosed her voice as high enough to indicate arrested development and symptomatic of early childhood trauma while her physical shape was assessed as anything but physically fit by modern medical standards. Then there was her rumored tryst with a President, which left us without high regard for either.

Thankfully most of us Engineers live in America. Thankfully America is a nation of people, which still remembers the days it chose Edison and Einstein over Picasso and Roman Polanski. Why did Americans prefer Engineers? Certainly this could not be a nation of Engineers?

Benjamin Franklin forwarded a theory, “ (In America) There are few great proprietors of the soil, and few tenants; most people cultivate their own lands, or follow some handicraft or merchandise; very few rich enough to live idly upon their rents or incomes, or to pay the high prices given in Europe for paintings, statues, architecture, and the other works of Art, that are more curious than useful. Hence the natural geniuses, that have arisen in America with such (artistic) talents, have uniformly quitted that country for Europe, where they can be more suitably rewarded.”

So America is not disposed to art because it is too poor? That could not be because some of the world’s richest self-made men are in the United States including Bill Gates. What did they do with their money? Did they buy artwork? The last I heard Bill and his friends were investing in satellite communications, space travel and in eliminating polio and funding research at Oxford University. The only art related purchase was the engineering drawings of an artist who is known as an “engineer” in Italy (Da Vinci). In America we think of him as the Engineer who never created technology but was diligent in keeping a journal. Even Archimedes deserved the title of Engineer more than that “engineer” of dubious sexual orientation. But what is “bella” to a Versace is “slut” to an American, so perhaps its best to leave this perception of Da Vinci to an error in translation.

What could be the cause of an American’s life of “happy mediocrity”? Why do Americans spend their money on charity and space travel over artwork? The only other rich people who spend their money so lavishly on charity and (oil) Engineers are the Saudi family. The only other place where statues and artwork are so scarce is in the Islamic world. But Muslims are against such “idolatry” on some religious precepts. Surely America was not filled with Muslims? Then I visited a Protestant Christian Church and therein I saw utter simplicity and not a notion of the baroque or over adornment or idols. Such is the belief of Americans, the English and the North Western Europeans who dislike iconography and art that has no utility but for the narcissist.

But what was the reaction of the American to such art? Did they go around demolishing it and condemning it as idolatry? Historically speaking the only people who chipped at a few statues may have been the Huguenots. For that crime their homes were marked and their families dragged into the streets and slaughtered by the French troops on St. Bartholomew’s Day. The Spanish Inquisitors must have made quite an impression on the French. Perhaps their simplest of workers had chosen to protest the expenditure of his tax moneys with a yellow tape. With that he had shown self-restraint and avoided succumbing to base passion and zeal and in turn had created an artwork of his own.