Unlike Plato, I’m a big fan of artist being welcomed into the ideal city! He thought that art imparts ideas, and so unless the artists had a noble or good ethical idea, it would corrupt people with a distortion. He was right that symbolic language imparts things directly into the imagination and heart.

Art doesn’t just teach ethics, it also beautifies otherwise only functional spaces. It facilitates a conversation between design and function, which feels truer to life, at least to me.
Art is not meant to be propaganda or an advertisement for an idea, it’s meant to be an invitation to something closer to how life should be and already is, if we see well. To behold well is to heal, as the best have said. Art teaches us to behold more truly, or closer to what things look like through a lens of Love.

When art serves commerce it’s purpose dies or is corrupted. When art serves politics it becomes a bumper sticker. But when a person expresses symbolically…

Beauty helps dignify neighborhoods and my neighbors. Glad that our airport here spends money having monthly installations by local and international artist. People also need art in transit. It helps us be and treat one another more as “thou” than “it”, as Martin Buber put it. The most recent installation at Austin airport, which mimics a gate, and invites the waiter to go anywhere imaginable including outer space, is a nice metaphor to add to a place of exits and entrances. Makes you aware of the airport as metaphor. Glad this city is still creative, even though it has grown so fast that we pray it can still remember its roots, and that it has always been a creative haven for those who needed a safe studio to make the art of their lives in!

Historically the church also used art as propaganda. What a gross misuse of creativity, to slur the image of God.

Reading a great book on the death of certain narratives in art history, so that art itself has to be re-contextualized. I would suggest it be re-contextualized inside of identity—what it means to be human. We create, therefore we are. Or, we are, therefore we create.
Why do we look at art? Why even more so, do we make it?

I disagree with Plato that artist are not also philosophers. That they don’t have a higher intelligence because they only mimic based on inspiration. Although I do make my best art when inspired, I also consider what is “channeling” through me. I’m not possessed, I believe in Jesus as God, and allow Him to teach and direct my art through His Holy Spirit.

That is not an ecstatic knowing, but rather it includes reason, without idolizing it.
Plato divided us into reason, spirit (emotions) and appetites (desires). And suggested that reason is meant to rule the three. But there is always Another Ruler. The One Jesus who rules over the whole soul of phyche. And I would add imagination to the human makeup.

We think, we feel, we express. And all three are ruled by Christ, once we are aware of His Presence.