Communicating Emotion: A Response to Denise's Question

In her blog Denise asked: In a society where beings can communicate emotions directly, such as one where all of the members are empathic, would art exist?

This is an incredibly interesting question. Denise brought up the example of the movie Avatar where the aliens or creatures in that movie simply attached themselves to the other objects or creatures to understand what they are feeling and what they are thinking. If we were able to do this, if we were able to express emotion directly and without words or expressions or symbolic objects, would we still create and want art? My answer is yes, art would still exist but not in the way it does now. Art, as Denise suggested in her post and what Tolstoy believed great art is, is something that expresses or conveys an emotion to the onlooker or receiver of the art. It conjures up this emotion within the reader, the looker, the receiver and makes them feel something that they once have felt. The artist calls this emotion back up from when they once felt it and put it onto paper or out into the world. We want and need art because we have trouble being empathetic, we have trouble expressing ourselves. We love the fact that we can express ourselves through an art form and have someone see it and feel the emotions we felt. We also love seeing the art and feeling understood. If, however, we did not need this middle man that is art, art would become a more recreational and beauty-based type of thing. By beauty-based, I mean that art’s value would come more from beauty than meaning and emotion like it is now because we do not need this emotional and feeling filled art. If we were able to express ourselves directly to each other, art would become a sport of sorts. It would become a contest to see who could make better or “more beautiful” art. It would become exactly what Tolstoy believed art was NOT, not based solely on beauty and skill but emotion and meaning. We as a society would also lose interest in these emotional things. Movies, books, paintings, etc. would all lose their meaning and importance to us as emotional and expressive pieces of work that we can relate to in our sometimes emotionally stunted lives. Lives in which we feel we either do not express ourselves too little or are understood rarely and in which art makes us feel like someone else knows. We, however, do not live in a world where we can express ourselves directly, so art will not become a sort of side project for people at all. But if we did, would Tolstoy and other philosophers have a place in this world, or would they too become somewhat unnecessary and recreational?