There is a kind of popular belief that artists are lazy, because they produce nothing particularly tangible compared to engineers, doctors or bakers — at least nothing functional that can be put to direct use toward a specific result. And yet, everyone listens to music, everyone chooses their clothes, everyone watches films or theatre plays, everyone reads books or goes dancing. We are all sensitive to the beauty of a living space, or of our own appearance. We pay attention to what the objects we buy say about us, in terms of belonging to a group, or through the ideas and connotations they carry. We choose them for their style or for the meaning they hold for us. In the same way, we are capable of differentiating between the various activities of society according to the "aesthetic universe" to which they belong in our imagination. If we think of the world of sport, we have in mind a set of symbols, colours, shapes, a certain feeling — that is to say, a certain number of "things" that evoke that particular world of sport for us. If we think instead of the world of haute couture, the aesthetic universe that comes to mind is radically different. So in a sense, art is never foreign to us; on the contrary, it is so omnipresent, so elemental, so essential to our awareness of things, that it is hard to grasp its contours and its function. There is an undeniable artistic dimension to everything we do.

If art is omnipresent, then what is it for? Here is a brief reflection that I will develop further in other articles on my site.

First of all, one might say that art produces feelings. When I listen to a piece of music, a sequence of chords can sometimes make me feel something I have never known before. A foreign, new, and pleasant feeling. A feeling that carries me away, that enlarges me. When music makes us vibrate, we hear more than the notes being played. And when a book takes us on a journey, when a story shakes us, we live more than the reading of a sequence of words printed on 500 pages of paper. In truth, we even forget that we are reading. Good painting is that which makes us forget the canvas, the brush and the mixtures of colour. Works have this power to open us onto something we had never felt before, something that produces joy and stirs in us a different mood, one we could not have accessed on our own.

Or else, they have the power to open within us unknown, forgotten spaces — spaces we remembered, but which were as though anaesthetised or disconnected from our immediate experience. We have all, for example, been touched, through contact with a place, a film, an image, a piece of music, by memories "more real than life" that these works brought back up in us. Works make it possible to summon to the surface of our conscious mind these deep feelings that are sometimes forgotten, to make us relive past experiences, sometimes even bringing back the smells. Such works are precious to us and we keep them like treasures we wish to preserve immaculate.

By creating something new, works of art make us live what we did not know, what was unknown to us. They have this power to draw us out of our sensory universe, to open breaches in it and widen it enough to allow something unknown to enter us — something that often has the effect of a sudden fondness, even a small one, or of a transcendence, even a slight one.

If we look more closely at this last point, there is something infinitely powerful about seeing our sensitivity opened and enlarged through a work that leaves us breathless. For when that happens, it is not merely a different feeling we experience. We are touched to the core, carried away by something that strikes us as particularly beautiful, tender or illuminating. We have the sense that the work in question puts its finger on something we had always been searching for, and that it expresses it with a precision and an accuracy we ourselves are incapable of. And through that, we feel joy and a connection to something greater. Now, are these not the very deep feelings, these transcendences, that form an aesthetic foundation upon which we orient our cognition, our relationship to the world, and which guide our actions?

By bringing us into contact with feelings we are not capable of experiencing on our own, art elevates us. It refines our mind, deepens and diversifies our power to feel, to experience and to act from a broader spectrum of feelings and ideations. Just as reading diversifies and enriches our vocabulary, the work of art — which acts at a more sensory and less conscious level — diversifies and enriches our sensitivity. Just as reading, by developing our language, refines our capacity to think with depth or complexity, the work of art refines our sensory and cognitive grammar, thereby extending the awareness we have of things and, consequently, our power of being.

A world devoid of art, or a world in which art is impoverished, produces submissive individuals with a naïve sensibility, because they are deprived of the tools that make up the modalities of their consciousness, both collective and individual. Without artistic expression, we are deprived of movement.

It is therefore not for nothing that dictatorships have always banned artistic expression. Artistic expression is a freedom without limits: to feel what one wants without any constraint, even what is "wrong," even revolt, anger, even what ridicules figures of authority, even what makes the people laugh. It allows us to become aware of internal feelings and to position ourselves in relation to things we experience in society, to adopt a posture of revolt and to live it within our inner selves.

In a totalitarian society, granting complete freedom to artistic expression amounts in fact to allowing people to give free rein to their power to feel, think and express absolutely everything they wish. It is therefore indeed a power — an immense power even. The work of art acts as a vehicle that then materialises these ideas, these feelings, these "ideations" into a tangible object. It acts as a kind of landmark, a symbol — or at least as an object that signifies something, that embodies a certain vision of the world, that transmits ideas or feelings, and therefore, like a tea bag that darkens the water in which it sits, it has the power to transmit, to persuade, to rally, or on the contrary to divide, to frighten, to ridicule, and thus to emancipate us from all the conditioning that a society has passed on to us.

In a totalitarian society where artistic expression is muzzled, I have the feeling that people would also be muzzled in their intimate freedom to feel what they want, conditioned by what it is good or bad, moral or immoral, legal or not, to experience within oneself.

To conclude, by bringing us into contact with feelings we are not capable of experiencing on our own, art draws us out of ourselves and elevates us. It refines our mind, deepens and diversifies our power to feel, to experience and to act from a broader spectrum of feelings and ideations. It makes it possible to unite around an idea or to divide and express disagreement. By being exposed to a variety of different works, we have the possibility of cultivating a variety of worlds within us, of giving free rein to our ideas and our feelings. Of letting them grow and develop. And inevitably these will express themselves one way or another through our lives, for we are renewed, enriched, inspired by these breaches that allow us to see further, to live more broadly, to feel more deeply, more nimbly — or simply to adopt other modes of consciousness, more complex or more simple, more univocal or more ambivalent, more superficial or more profound, than those we knew and with which we used to function. It is our power of being that is enriched.

And so, the arts too create the world. Not as engineers or architects do, not from a material point of view, but at a perhaps more fundamental level — that of consciousness and meaning, the level that is at the origin of what we feel and think.