Why Ignoring Art Limits Your Success and Personal Growth

The Dangerous Impact of Avoiding Art

One of the best movies I saw last year was Dune: Part 2. Who made the movie for me was the success of Timothée Chalamet as the young Paul Atriedes.

Yesterday I went to see him play a young Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. This is the story of the early career of Bob Dylan, from his break to the complete breakdown at the ‘65 Newport Folk Festival.

The movie was based on the book about this period of Dylan’s career, Dylan Goes Electric. Outside of it being a really interesting look into the early career of Dylan and his relationship to fame and the larger folk music scene, it was a really captivating movie.

It struck me watching the movie how much of Dylan’s early discography I know, and yet outside of that movie, I couldn’t tell you the last time I had listened to Dylan. Maybe more than a decade, and yet I knew the words and the music still stirred me.

What is this quality of the great pieces of art that become timeless?

Surely it is not one feature but the totality of the work which can make it last for centuries, creating the same emotional intensity as when it was first produced.

I remember walking into that room in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa is, that small portrait on the bare wall behind the protective glass with armed guards, throngs of people pushing to get a better look, me trying to tussle my way through to see it while pulling my girlfriend along so we didn’t get disconnected.

That sly smile on her face capturing so much of us in her, and never losing the intensity.

Dylan was able to capture so much of what was happening at that time and speak it into expression, so that even the people really fighting for the civil rights and social issues of the time saw him as a larger-than-life figure.

At one point in the movie, Pete Seeger, played by Edward Norton, says that everyone else is a teaspoon while Dylan is a shovel.

The Essential Role of Art in Understanding Life and Leadership: Lessons from Wittgenstein

Seeing this movie and having this reawakening with Dylan’s music came to me against this overarching backdrop I’ve been thinking about with Wittgenstein.

He saw art, music, poetry, etc., as being able to teach us about life in the same way a book on ethics could. And I think that this can account for some of what we see with Dylan.

Those early folk songs are just so good, and they are coming at a period of time where the US, as well as the rest of the world, were afraid of nuclear destruction.

And each one of those early songs like Song for Woody or Girl from the North Country present an entire world in themselves, they are of this world and reality but create something wholly new in their own imagination.

It is this word, imagination, which became so important for what Wittgenstein sought in the arts as a guide to being because it exists outside of scientific understanding, it is a non-theoretical understanding grasped in art or music.

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Another thinker who later in his career turned towards this same idea was Heidegger.

Dylan’s early folk hits could be likened to what Heidegger saw in the peasants’ shoes of Van Gogh, where an entire world is constructed in the work of art, created with its own understanding and rules and reality.

And perhaps this intuitive grasp of what art does by Seeger and the members of the Newport Jazz Festival led to this overwhelming devastation when Dylan plays electric. Seeger is trying to preserve this music so it can speak to the world and last for generations, whereas Dylan saw himself first as a musician, not a particular type of musician.

He wanted to explore his art and follow where it took him, whereas Seeger saw the art as a vehicle for a larger movement or expression, as telling the stories of freedom and pushing for social change.

Seeger was always more interested in the definition of the art than in the creation of the art, and this led to the breakdown in Dylan and his relationship in the movie.

I do not know how much of this is actually Hollywood drama to sell tickets and historical fact, but in the movie, Seeger is portrayed as the old guard trying to protect the medium he loves rather than trying to widen its participation in the world.

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How Dylan’s Early Music Explores Deep Human Realities: A Lesson in Imagination

Whether one sees Dylan’s House of the Rising Sun as better than The Animals’ version makes no difference to Wittgenstein or Heidegger, as both versions contain a world of intuitive understanding beyond the generalities of science.

Both versions produce depth in a wholly subjective world even if one is electric and one is acoustic, and this seems to be the larger issue in the movie.

It is not the Folk music revival versus the popular sweeping tide of rock; it is the attachment to the definitions of art rather than the experiences of it.

The fine line between defining art and experiencing it is what really matters.

It is this ability to expand our understanding of what art can be, and this change in perspective is at the heart of Dylan’s electrification.

Dylan wasn’t just shifting musical styles; he was evolving his own identity, which prompted the world around him to reflect on its own ideas of what music and art should be.

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