“Is Art a Waste of Time?”

In the writing passage “Is Art a Waste of Time” by Rhys Southan he talked about a concept that I have never thought about before. He was caught up with a group of people in a activist movement called “Effective Altruism”. They had a concept that, “..People who spend their available time creating art are not feeding the homeless, art is not worth pursuing.” To me art is not a big thing in my life. Im not the most artistic person or the most creative, but I do enjoy looking at other pieces of art. Art is a very broad category anyways. It could be a painting, a piece of music, a book, a film, or even a dance. Without these things all of our lives would be different. Could we live without all these things though? Yes, I would say so. We could still live a happy life and find new or different things to replace the “art”. Art is not something in the world we necessarily need in order to survive but it is something that brings pure joy and happiness. Just because someone with the job as an artist might not be “Feeding the homeless” but they are making a difference to their customers and themselves. 

Another quote that Southan said that stuck out to me was when he questioned “Does your preferred good deed make as much of a difference as simply handing over the money?”. This was a puzzling question to me. Should a  good deed be more meaningful or more hard to accomplish rather then just getting rewarded easily with money? I don’t think it needs to be. If someone is going out of their way and being nice and donating their money to a corporation,that to me is considered a good deed. They don’t even need to spend their money on anything but themselves but they go out of their way to do so. To a lot of people donating money is a lot easier then to go out and buying something.