Art is a paradox

Art is not life; it is artifice (the words are related, as you can see). And yet, the best art is truer than reality. What I mean is this: Take as an example The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. While it is fiction and Holden Caulfield isn't a real person, the story is interesting because there is something to Holden that we recognize as essential to either ourselves or to certain people we've met. Compare that against a so-called "reality" show, which is anything but real. Or take Melville's Moby Dick. I mean, I don't know about you, but I've never been on a whaling ship, hunting down a whale. And yet, by reading the book, in a way I have. The experience rings true and, more than that, resonates in your mind as an experience containing essential truths about real life (even though real life is, when you dissect it, empty of meaning.)

Ergo, good art fills a void for us that reality cannot. It tells us something about ourselves without even trying. It gives us meaning where there was none before. But all of that is relative to the individual; one man's masterpiece is another man's garbage, and vice versa. Reality, when stripped bare of artifice, is a meaningless movement of nothings, a roiling chaos. Art is not order, but it is a path to order, and there are billions of such paths. In fact, it's safe to say, I think, that we all follow our own paths to order--to meaning--even if our paths may occasionally overlap the paths of others.