Art and Survival

Ralph Perrine
1999

Most of us sense that art is important, but aren't sure why. In general we tend to feel that art is one of those "niceties" of life, enjoyed by comfortable civilizations who are blessed with a well managed food supply and therefore have the time to create, view and discuss frivolities such as art.

Art can certainly be used as decor, a container for personal memories, or a way of picking a fight with "society". But what is it really? What is its original purpose and importance to us?

Art is immutably linked to the survival of civilization because it is the basis for our ability to develop and evolve visual literacies.

What is a visual literacy? Visual literacy refers to the human ability to communicate and understand concepts using graphical symbols. We develop simple drawings and over time these drawings become icons or symbols. We assign an accepted meaning to these symbols. Eventually these symbols accumulate into either an alphabet, or a collection of symbols used for a certain purpose (like the engineering symbols used in a blueprint). The drawings made with these symbols sometimes become organized into reusable patterns - templates that can be used over and over again to assist a planning or development effort. I have catalogued 12 such drawings that can be used to plan your life and business efforts in a collection I call "12 Drawings That Will Change Your Life". Like tic tac toe grids, these drawings are easy, quick and can be used over and over for specific purposes.

The ability to develop and reuse complex visual vocabularies, as far as we know, is uniquely human. It is also a critical underpinning of human civilization. Throughout human history, our visual literacy has evolved to include a written language as well as a rich set of symbols used for a wide array of design and engineering purposes.

Writing itself is one of the most critical and perhaps the first form of visual literacy. In addition to writing, we have created vast arrays of symbols that are used for communication, design, collaborative planning and development. In the 20th century we refined even further the use of visual vocabularies, with innovations such as the Unified Modeling Language. These visual vocabularies assist individuals and teams in conceptualizing abstract and complex subjects like physics, economics, and large software systems.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of an evolving visual literacy. New visual literacies take our problem solving skills to the next level. The ability to develop, refine and use new sets of visual artifacts is critical to our survival. We use these new visual artifacts to create new concepts that will in turn give us new clarity in percieving our existence and its challenges.

An evolving visual literacy is one of the most important tools that a complex society depends on to prevent it from returning to pre-civilization. Art is more than decor, pastime or propaganda tool. Art is something deeper, something more central. Art is more or less a research and development department for new emerging visual literacies. That is not the only thing it is, mind you, but it is a tremenduously important one. It is crucial to the survival of our species, because it is crucial to the perpetuation and exansion of human intelligence.

Somewhere today an artist is creating the first crude artifacts of a new visual literacy that may one day give our descendants the ability to collaboratively understand and resolve a threat that would otherwise exterminate them.

Or so we hope.