Art Appreciation

More than once a friend has astonished me by appreciating only the most dreadful music or none at all. I pitied them.

And yet it has always been that way for me regarding any kind of Art, besides music. No doubt other people see that as a deficiency in my central nervous system. Or maybe the deficiency is not physiological, but instead lies in narrow opinions. "Art" has always seemed like a useless and expensive decoration that a bourgeois woman sticks in her living room, in order to evoke praise from dinner guests.

Whatever the cause, I was floored the other day when I was reading a book on the ascent of our species, thousands of years ago.

 “The constructive character of the potter's craft reacted on human thought. Building up a pot was a supreme instance of creation by man. The lump of clay was perfectly plastic; man could mold it as he would. In making a tool of stone or bone he was always limited by the shape and size of the original material; he could only take bits away from it. No such limitations restrict the activity of the potter. She can form her lump as she wishes; she can go on adding to it without any doubts as to the solidity of the joins. In thinking of “creation,” the free activity of the potter in “making form where there was no form” constantly recurs to man's mind; the similes in the Bible taken from the potter's craft illustrate the point.” V. Gordon Childe, "Man Makes Himself," chapter on the Neolithic Revolution, p. 79.

Now why didn't I run across this idea decades ago? To me, at least, it is a completely fresh way to look at something that I'd previously put no value on;  the human mind finding a power that breaks down the barrier between itself and the material world, and in doing so, creates something attractive and useful. I will never denigrate the Arts again by immediately jumping to the misleading notion of The Pretty-poo.