The Potency of Art

There are many arguments today about why art matters. It is a form that authenticates what is most human about humanity, it celebrates and affirms the diversity of cultures and identities, it upholds values of individual freedoms, it is a good pedagogical tool for teaching social and political ideas, it is a sound economic investment, it gives pleasure, and so on. Among these competing claims, I want simply to add one more, and a fairly prosaic one at that: it is that the experience art serves us from being conned. In experiencing how a work tries to convince us of its worth and its right to exist, we come to grasp how its aesthetic qualities echo in spirit and inform all the manipulative means by which people use reason to try to convince us of the value of what they are saying, doing, or selling.