The arts superfluous? BAH!!

It is a fact that, if we had to strip to the bare necessities, 'the arts' would probably be the first to go, since it is not essential to survival in the same way that food, social system and security are. Singapore, being such a young society, is used to being practical, since that's what got us so far in so short a time. It takes time for people to take a leap to see the arts as more than just nancing about on stage or decorating museum walls.

What a lot of people here don't share is the view that the arts is pretty much an extension of our everyday existence; a different way of expressing the nuances of life. Everything we do is on a stage; every face we put on is a mask. We behave differently in different social situations. Isn't that some form of acting? We exclaim how beautiful someone's handwriting is. Isn't that a kind of art? What we collectively call 'the arts' is really setting aside something we do all the time and focussing on it, bringing it out as an entity on its own.

Perhaps we have to get over those days where actors and artists were seen as lower-caste, immoral leeches of society. Why should actors get scorned as idle and frivolous when they act or sing on a stage, while teachers telling children stories and singing songs at playschool are seen to be conducting a productive profession? They're doing essentially the same thing.

Why do audiences keep coming if they see the arts as superfluous? To partake in an hour or two of beauty and magic, and then forget about it as they return to the mundane everyday business of living? Are artists like alcohol - kinda fun to have around, but the first to be forgotten, minus the hangover? Maybe it will take a day, a week or a year of a total absence of arts for a society to realise how much emptier their existence is without it.

But hang on - that's impossible! Where there is beauty, there is art. Where there is role-play, there is theatre. Where there is a written word, there is prose. Art is not separate from survival. It is part of the very state of being.