Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”---Banksy

"The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real."---Herbert Marcuse

I concur with all three of the above. Art SHOULD provoke new feelings we don't normally have, even unpleasant ones, and its implicit goal is to expand our sense of what is real and what CAN be real.

Spiritual or religious purposes in the earliest hunter-gatherer days. If shamans ate mushrooms and other psychoactive substances, then storytelling and images were the only way to communicate what they experienced. A tribe's history had to be retained by remembering narratives and performance rituals (proto-plays) that might involve using graphic representations, too. Dances, drums, primitive music generated background moods that augmented the rest. Art might have primarily been about mnemonics in the beginning.