Modern economies reward efficiency, not reflection. Our institutions—schools, platforms, governments—are calibrated to deliver outcomes, track progress, and benchmark success. In this landscape, the arts are often treated as indulgences: budget-line luxuries, extracurricular distractions, or marketplace novelties.
Yet this utilitarian bias misses something profound. The arts are not ornamental. They are infrastructural. They construct emotional intelligence, preserve cultural memory, and teach us how to hold ambiguity without collapsing into chaos. These are not soft skills. They are survival skills.
“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough,” Morrison wrote. “You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”
And still, we do photograph. We do paint. We write and sing and build because that is how wisdom metabolizes beauty into meaning, and then into care.
Wisdom vs. Information
Information is abundant. Wisdom is scarce. That distinction is not semantic; it is civilizational. Information accumulates. Wisdom distills. Information moves fast. Wisdom waits. In a time when speed is power, wisdom feels almost countercultural.
Our systems are built to privilege the former. Schools drill facts. Platforms reward virality. Even AI tools, designed to predict, synthesize, and optimize, often reinforce the illusion that speed is equivalent to insight. But real wisdom demands contradiction. It asks you to live with discomfort. The arts are uniquely suited to teach this because they do not promise resolution. They offer resonance.
Morrison understood this dissonance. “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”
The act of making or encountering art is exactly that: a surrender to not-knowing, to being moved, to floating beyond what you can prove.
The Arts as Infrastructure
We do not fund wisdom because we do not recognize it as infrastructure. Roads, bridges, and broadband get line items. Poetry does not. What holds a democracy together is not bandwidth. It is shared meaning. And the arts are where that meaning is negotiated, preserved, and renewed.
Studies show that communities with greater access to cultural programs have stronger mental health, more civic participation, and higher educational outcomes. Arts education reduces incarceration rates and increases graduation. Music therapy improves recovery time. Theater builds empathy. Despite overwhelming evidence of impact, arts funding remains precarious, subject to political whim or philanthropic fashion.
Who Gets to Be Wise?
There is a deeper inequality embedded here. When we devalue the arts, we also narrow the pathways to wisdom. Wealthier communities can afford museums, orchestras, writing retreats, and time to reflect. Poorer communities are expected to be resilient without being given tools to process trauma, build beauty, or create stories that last.
“Definitions belong to the definers,” Morrison warned, “not the defined.”
The arts allow people to define themselves, to reclaim authorship over their identity, history, and hope. That is not just cultural. It is political.
Toward a New Classification
We need a reclassification not just in budgets, but in consciousness. Art is not the opposite of work. It is the foundation of wise work. It cultivates the sensibilities we will need most in this century: humility, nuance, imagination, interdependence.
Wisdom should be considered a public good, and art one of its most consistent delivery systems. That means cultural stipends, yes. Public murals, yes. But also curriculum reform, AI art policy, and treating local artists like civil servants of the soul.
Morrison again: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
If that is true, then let us fund the measure. Let us steward the meaning.