Is art as important as math? It has become common practice in schools, and centers for higher learning across the nation to eliminate art courses in attempts to save money in their shrinking budgets. Art courses are routinely cut from the curriculum, taking a back seat to other programs perceived to be of greater importance, i.e. mathematics, literature, reading, writing, and history. Although these areas of study are essential in becoming a productive individual in society, there are those who see art as being equally, if not of greater importance to a flourishing mind. Dr. Nigel Spivey in the BBC documentary “The Day Pictures Were Born” states that without art “life would be impossible, and our world would be unrecognizable”, a fact that goes easily over looked in modern day society.
Many people consider art, or the visual arts in particular, as irrelevant in their everyday lives, but nothing could be further from the truth. People interact with art almost every hour of the day, from the street signs …show more content…
Spivey explains how “humans made art, and art made us human”, in other words mankind created art, and art is primarily responsible for the creation of “humanity”. Art is one of the first developments that separated homo-sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom, for even a chimp can create and use primitive tools like early man, but a chimp has yet to finger paint on the trees. Also consider that mankind was creating crude forms of art possibly before any dialects of formalized languages were in use. A distinction that we also use to distinguish man from beast, our verbal and written communication skills. Although many people feel art is nonessential in their modern lives, society would simply not exist without art, art enlightens us, art is indispensable to man-made design, and art may have played a major role in our development of agriculture, the sustainment method of