Art Is Not Useless

It's just crammed in the wrong box

At Yale, Harold Bloom’s students would randomly shout line numbers from Paradise Lost, and he would recite them from memory.

Bloom loved the Western Canon. Still, he said that art is not “useful.” Attempting to sum it up into tidy moral lessons or, God forbid “takeaways” is to diminish and misunderstand it.

Hell yeah, brother. When we ask the question, “Is art useful?” we’re already on the wrong track. We’re trying to cram art into a box it doesn’t belong.

I’m reminded of Elon Musk posting on X about listening to the Iliad at 1.25x speed. I mean, I’m glad he’s listening (and audio is definitely the best way to experience it), but The Iliad is not Atomic Habits; you're not meant to hurry to the key takeaways: “Top 10 Lesson from The Iliad: #7 Don’t Get Shot in Your Heel.”

Elon Musk, at least, takes it on faith that the staples of the Western Canon are important. He hasn’t descended to the debased materialism of Sam Bankman-Fried, who said that Shakespeare being the greatest writer of all time was mathematically unlikely. 

Literature is not software. Updates do not make the old versions irrelevant. Art does not function that way – it has different rules altogether. The Iliad is important because it is wondrous.

This claim sounds “out there” nowadays, I suppose. Fluffy. Something a school teacher would tell you and you would semi-believe. But, really, it's as plain as day. You wouldn't listen to music at a higher speed to “get through it.” The point of music is not get to the end the quickest; obviously, the point of music is to listen to the music. You don't need to be told that. Listening to The Iliad at a faster speed does not get you to where you want to go faster, because the point is not getting to the end. Reading the Western Canon is like enjoying music, but it’s deeper than a good feeling. These written stories abstracted us from the natural world with ever-growing banks of metaphors, taking the sensual and the mythical and transmuted them into fossils of information, which our ancestors used and traded. This is the foundation of how you and everyone else is able to “think.” It is the origin of you… if you consider you your thoughts and feelings. To peer back into the works is to peer into the architecture of your own soul.

It’s not homework. It’s awe-inspiring. Humans uniquely seek awe. We’re the only animals that will stare at the stars. All other sighted animals can see the stars, but they don't look. We’re fundamentally different from animals because we have a sense that there is a cosmic order beyond us — Logos — that is understandable. And through art we seek to understand it. Often, this has nothing to do with food, sex, or shelter.

Of course, by doing these "useless" tasks, occasionally we discover things like navigation by the stars, which allow us to traverse the vast ocean. But figuring out how to navigate is not why ancient people stargazed. They did it because it was divine.

I do understand where Harold Bloom is coming from when he says that art is not “useful,” but there's an important distinction to be drawn here. Art is not meant to be useful in the realms of the marketplace. It’s undeniably useful in another realm — a realm we’ve lost all ability to speak of.

Despite sanitizing “the sacred” from our lives, we still find ourselves disgusted, if we're sensitive at all, when the sacred and the profane mix. When someone talks about the utility of reading The Iliad or the mathematical likeliness of Shakespeare's genius, we recoil. Our experience of gazing at the stars or listening to music is so self-evidently worthwhile, when someone suggests that they're useless (or, maybe worse, useful) that goes against our first-person experience of wonder. It also reveals that the person has not himself experienced it. It’s almost funny.

But, still, art is useful. Just not in the profane world.

The Indo-European root of the word "art" is "ar"; it's the same root that we get the word "arm" from. It means "to piece together." Art is fundamentally something that's meant to be useful. 

Back when the sacred was self-evident, before anyone could conceive a world without gods, spirits, or the Creator God, we hired artists to depict and to facilitate our experience of the divine. Before modern art, people like da Vinci or Michelangelo were hired not because it was some airy-fairy "art for art’s sake" sort of endeavor; they were hired for the very practical purpose of making things that help people experience God.

Art is obviously useful; there would be no reason for it to exist otherwise. 

But, whenever I read Paradise Lost, I'm not thinking about how it's going to benefit my job as a head of content for billionaires in Silicon Valley. Those as two distinct realms. Ultimately, my job is profane. That doesn't mean it's bad; it's just the thing I do in order to feed myself.

I try to have this whole other aspect of my life: the sacred. I go to church, I read great texts. There, I'm not looking for a particular KPI.

The divine is different from the profane because, for one, we don't know the outcome before we set out. The divine demands submission of our will and its preconceptions. That doesn’t mean there won’t be a useful outcome; we just can’t know what it will be. When people looked up at the stars and wondered about our place in the cosmos, they didn’t do it to learn to navigate. That was just a happy accident.

When Galileo looked to the heavens, he was driven by the same force: the sacred. What's ironic is what he discovered there was deemed sacrilege by the Church. Even though the Church persecuted Galileo — don’t get it twisted. It's still the divine that propelled him to do his “useless” endeavor of gazing at Jupiter’s moons. The profane world just doesn’t inspire us to do that. Same goes for the study of literature, insects, our natural environment — things that don't have an immediate KPI. The divine is what inspires us to do those things.

That's why Newton was an alchemist. That's why Einstein was a mystic. It's why the greatest quantum physicists have almost unanimously said that they have found God after a stint of atheism, because what they find at the bottom of their glass is an ever-expanding mystery.

There are times when we have to make ends meet, take care of things that are immediate and practical. That’s fine. But there are other times when we're supposed to expand our perception, allow wonder to guide us, and not know what we are going to find there. Because the minute we start thinking, "Oh, I'm gonna trek beyond the fabric of the firmament and find this widget," you've immediately kicked yourself out of the divine. You're no longer able to follow your genius.

It’s not really about whether or not art is useless. It's that we've tried to cram art into a domain in which it doesn't belong.

Art is useful to the spirit. If you don’t believe in the spirit, you’re going to struggle to explain simple things like why you like music.