The artist has a special role in the affairs of mankind. While society moves forward through commercial, financial, technological, and public services, the artist provides the creative touch that enhances quality of life, adding beauty, vision, and spiritual content.
The balance between concrete and abstract powers has always been a struggle, with society generally favoring the extroverted, convergent thinker. Where success is measured primarily by financial gain, the artist may lack the rewards and fiscal stability found in more conventional occupations. In a world governed by supply and demand, only a portion of society actively supports the arts, while many people remain unaware of the aesthetic and spiritual contribution an artist makes to the community.
Eventually, a reckoning may occur in society’s consciousness. As the Fourth Ray of Harmony through Conflict, Beauty, and Art becomes increasingly influential, the artist’s role may become more prominent and better understood.
Regrettably, artists have often been viewed as impractical or incompetent because their thought processes may be abstract, intuitive, and difficult for the concrete thinker to follow. The stereotypical artist is sometimes pictured as living a bohemian and unconventional life, perhaps accompanied by addiction, irresponsibility, or disregard for accepted behavior. Yet stereotypes reveal little about the true creative person.
Artists may possess unusual sensitivities that make them especially responsive to beauty, emotion, atmosphere, and the harsher aspects of a materialistic world. In a society that measures success largely by financial status, the value artists contribute can easily be overlooked.
The struggling artist often faces both the myth of failure and the very real difficulties imposed by a society that may not adequately reward creative work. The image of the “starving artist” is no more accurate as a description of all artists than the “absent-minded professor” represents every intellectual or the “computer nerd” represents everyone working in technology. We should set these stereotypes aside so we can consider the vital role the artist actually plays in society.
In many traditional and Indigenous societies, the maker of sacred images, ceremonial objects, garments, masks, paintings, music, or other ritual forms occupied an important position within the community. Creative work could be inseparable from religious ceremony, healing, ancestral tradition, and the transmission of sacred knowledge. The artist might therefore work alongside the priest, healer, or shaman, contributing to ceremonies intended to restore harmony or connect the community with spiritual forces.
Mandalas, sacred objects, ceremonial garments, masks, music, dance, and symbolic designs were not made merely for decoration. Their colors, forms, symbols, and rhythms contributed to the ceremony’s meaning and power.
The modern artist does not ordinarily function as a healer in this traditional sense, although art’s healing potential continues in art therapy and other therapeutic uses of visual art, music, movement, and creative expression. A trained art therapist may use art to help individuals explore feelings and experiences that are difficult to express verbally. Even outside a therapeutic setting, artwork can affect emotions and the subconscious in ways the artist may never fully know.
Art is a symbolic tool that can surpass language.
It can cross barriers between nations, cultures, religions, and different value systems. Certain forms and symbols are understood immediately, while others acquire their meaning through a particular culture or tradition. A work of art may communicate an emotion long before its intellectual meaning has been understood.
Some paintings provide narrative or historical documentation of a people or civilization. More abstract and sacred symbols may convey ideas and principles that cannot be communicated so easily through ordinary language.
The artist is therefore not only a communicator but also a recorder and teacher.
Art history allows us to read portions of humanity’s history through its visual record. Works of art preserve the concerns, ideals, conflicts, beliefs, aspirations, and states of consciousness of the cultures that produced them.
Our modern artists continue this role. They record humanity’s conflict within an increasingly technological society, explore abstract ideas, use new technologies as creative tools, and attempt to embody the dominant forces of their time within works of art.
In the role of visionary, the artist may contact what I would call the universal mind and catch a glimpse of the ideal.
That glimpse does not necessarily arrive fully formed. It may first appear as an intuition, an image, an impression, or an idea whose significance is not yet understood. The artist then struggles to bring that impression into manifestation.
Such efforts are not always immediately appreciated. Artists who introduce unfamiliar forms or ideas may be ridiculed or misunderstood because the public has not yet developed the consciousness necessary to respond to what the artist is attempting to express. Years or even decades may pass before the value of a particular artist or movement is recognized.
Art museums demonstrate how powerfully artistic visions can survive their own time. They continue to inspire viewers through timeless expressions of beauty, drama, devotion, conflict, intellect, emotion, and imagination.
Each period of history has pursued certain dominant ideas that reflect the consciousness and ideals of its age. Historians can interpret those periods through the eyes of artists.
For centuries, Western artists portrayed the great spiritual ideas represented by the Church. Later, they recorded the power and ceremony of monarchy. Gradually, the ordinary person entered art more prominently, and the concerns of everyday human life became worthy subjects in their own right.
The Renaissance reflected a rebirth of intellectual inquiry and interest in humanity and the classical world. Romanticism emphasized emotion, imagination, nature, and the ideal. The Impressionists explored the changing effects of light and color upon visual perception. Modern artists confronted industrialization, technology, fragmentation, abstraction, and the changing relationship of the individual to an increasingly impersonal world.
Throughout these changes, the artist has done more than record what already exists.
The artist has often sensed what is approaching.
Through sensitivity, intuition, imagination, and the abstract mind, the artist reaches toward ideas that may not yet have taken recognizable form within society. Art can therefore act as both a record of human consciousness and a precursor of its development.
We look to our artists not merely to decorate the world we already possess, but to envision what humanity may become next.
This version stays quite close to what you wrote. I especially preserved your final idea because I think it is the real conclusion of the article: the artist not only records a civilization but may anticipate the consciousness that is coming next.
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