Think about the art you’ve enjoyed in your life: the novels, the television, the music, the poetry, the sculpture, the paintings—the list goes on. Now try to imagine a scenario in which none of this art had ever been made. Even though non-fiction books have been published, and warning chimes still witness the closing of subway doors, there are no symphonies, and no novels for you to tote to the beach. There’s no such thing as an art museum, even though natural history museums everywhere still proudly display their fossils and dino bones. Network TV broadcasts news all day, every day.

What would we lose in a world like this?

Some of the losses are obvious: without the arts we would have a whole lot less fun. The joy and diversion ofWet Hot American Summerwould be gone. We wouldn’t be able to feel the real wonder we do feel in front ofMichelangelo’s David. We wouldn’t have access to the spooky thrills we enjoy while watchingThe Ring. The exquisite pain of Mozart’sRequiem in D Minor也将是不可用的。如果没有运动和其他游戏，我们可能会发现自己无聊和不满足在我们的休闲时间。(Of course, sports and board games could only exist in a world without art if they are not themselves art—and there are those who insist that they are. For more on that, check outthis week's episodewhere Josh and Ray are in conversation with Thi Nguyen, author ofGames: Agency as Art.)

一个纯朴的世界也会有更深刻的缺陷。最伟大的艺术不仅给我们带来欢乐和刺激;it alsoexpands our understanding of one another, allowing for greater empathy and kindness. Art can model those attitudes we need to adopt in order to be good to one another, and it can display the horrors of the actual world (as opposed to the supernatural horrors of counterfactual worlds) so that we can go and do something about them. It’s not just that art can bring us entertainment and comfort in hard times (anyone else watchingGilmore Girls?); it can also bring home uncomfortable truths we would otherwise not understand (Josh and I are discussing Jordan Peele’sGet Outi在我们目前联合教学的班级中)。

我们可以简单地说:艺术给了我们情感上和认知上的价值。我不否认这点。我认为这是一个重要的事实。But leaving things here would dramaticallyunderstate艺术的重要性。艺术品的存在不仅仅是为了满足我们已经拥有的需求，或者提供我们已经热爱的事物的实例。艺术品可以教会我们如何评估我们不知道如何评估的东西。他们告诉我们如何喜欢新事物，如何想要新事物，甚至如何需要新事物。

我能想到的例子都是个人的。普鲁斯特教会我重视日常生活中的感官细节——尤其是我童年早期的所有气味和声音，它们将我当时生活的整个质感联系在一起。肖邦的华尔兹向我展示了如何在抑扬顿挫的主旋律变奏中找到美，它们比欢快的同类更加复杂。André德雷恩的野兽般的色调让我渴望以一种新的颜色来看待物理世界——这种颜色不是显示物体表面的性质，而是显示投射在物体上的光的强度。

Changing our values doesn’t require changing them in a positive way. The arts can show you how to abhor something that previously seemed innocuous. Shirley Jackson taught me to feel the horror, and not just the humor, in the absurd gaslighting of women in contemporary America. David Foster Wallace brought out disgust at sheer diversion for diversion’s sake. These lessons weren’t rosy ones, and they didn’t leave me caringmorefor gaslighting, or for diversion. But this transformative power of art is no less important than its own cheery cousin.

If all this is right—if the arts can give us new loves, new abhorrences, new needs—then perhaps a world without art would not be as boring and dissatisfying as I said above. After all, a world without art would be one less structured by specific values. Without the arts, we would care for less. We might find less to be angry about. We would genuinely need less than we do here in our real world. So perhaps we would find fewer gaping holes in our lives and our communities.

Does that sound like a good thing? Not to me. And I don’t think it would have sounded like a good thing to the poet Audre Lorde, either. “Poetry is not a luxury,” she wrote in anessay by that name.

It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

洛德明确地向这里的女性，尤其是黑人女性发表了讲话，她把诗歌视为争取自由的必要方面。洛儿知道这场斗争在她有生之年还没有结束。但她的观点对我们所有人，对所有艺术也有更广泛的影响。诗歌对我们任何人都不是奢侈品，艺术对我们任何人也不是奢侈品。

We might be able to think the nameless only in poetry, as Lorde put it, but its not being thought at all does not imply that we are better off not thinking about it. The same goes for all sorts of needs, wants, and values: the fact that we don’t have them now, and so we now don’t see how our lives could be richer, does not mean we are better off without having those needs, wants, and values at all.

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