You hear a lot of hay made over the uselessness of art, but such claims take a pretty narrow view of use value. A poem is imminently valuable in at least several respects, especially if you think poets are legislators, priests, or purifiers of language. This requires one to be up pretty early and at it to execute with any dexterity. But those are poems. That’s an easy one. What do you do with, say, people who carve exquisite structures out of pencil lead?
Here’s one by Diem Chau
Another by a hungarian artist known as cerkahegyzo
And here are a few by Dalton Ghetti
Anytime a familiar object is removed from its use-context and made into art our attention is especially arrested, and that wonder alone, if I can call it that, justifies its existence. Our health demands that we experience legitimate wonder; but the capacity for it can become atrophied or corrupted, and it seems that maybe it has. Maybe wondrous works and discoveries are so common, and so available through YouTube videos and pills and in our pockests, this function has been merely exhausted. Of course, a person must have some capacity for wonder to know what it means to need it or to desire its exercise or renewal. Probably most everyone by now has heard Louis C.K. do his bit: Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy. So feast your eyes on pencil lead art and learn to love your 21st century life.