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The Arts

Art (and Philosophy) and the Ultimate Aims of Human Life

Raymond Tallis is hungry to expand human consciousness through art.

Past and Future

In what follows, I shall focus less on what art has been or has meant in the past than on what it might be or might mean in the future. Of course my vision of the future of art is informed and inspired by its past. Otherwise I would not be justified in using the word ‘art’.

Focussing on the future avoids the problem that, in the past, art has always been inextricably tangled up with many other things. The distinction between arts and crafts, for example, is not hard and fast; art has rarely been exclusively ‘for art’s sake’; and what we call literature has been used for practical instruction, for the transmission of information, for edification and for political, cultural and religious propaganda.

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