The Purpose of Art

This essay emerges from Philip Glass’s decision to withdraw his work from the Kennedy Center and from institutional reactions, expressed from positions of cultural governance, that sought to redefine art as neutral entertainment.

This essay emerges from Philip Glass’s decision to withdraw his work from the Kennedy Center and from institutional reactions, expressed from positions of cultural governance, that sought to redefine art as neutral entertainment.

The insistence on reducing art to depoliticized entertainment is neither a minor deviation nor a circumstantial misunderstanding. It reveals a profound misapprehension of the purpose of art and of the place creation occupies in human life. When cultural institutions advocate for a neutral, comfortable and consensual art, they are not protecting audiences, but attempting to displace art from its vital function. Art does not exist to fill leisure time or to soften conflicts. It exists because life demands listening, tension and attention to what does not easily settle.

It is from this demand that art constitutes itself not as distraction, but as a practice of listening to the world, rooted in experience, in historical time and in a sensitive responsibility toward life. Art emerges from friction with reality and from a refusal to accept as natural whatever silences, simplifies or impoverishes human experience.

As Hélio Oiticica affirmed, art fulfills its function only when it destabilizes. When it interrupts habitual ways of seeing, unsettles certainties and opens space for other modes of feeling and perceiving. An art that merely confirms expectations ceases to listen. And when it ceases to listen, it loses its reason for being.

It is within this horizon that Philip Glass’s decision to withdraw his symphony from the Kennedy Center must be understood. It is not a political mistake nor an impulsive reaction, but a gesture of coherence. Like the position taken by Béla Fleck and other artists who chose to withdraw, it constitutes an exercise of aesthetic integrity sustained by the integrity of the artist. There can be no separation between work and life when the institutional context begins to operate as a symbolic frame that neutralizes the meaning of creation.

When Roma Daravi states that there is no place for politics in the arts, she does not remove politics from the artistic field. She merely replaces it with a silent politics, one that operates through normalization, the suppression of conflict and the domestication of dissent. Likewise, when Richard Grenell advocates for an art that simply entertains everyone, he advances a conception of creation that relinquishes its critical force in favor of comfortable consensus.

Art does not belong to ideological spectrums. It belongs to the complexity of human experience, to the diversity of existence and to the defense of the dignity of life. Its commitment is not to institutional maintenance nor to audience comfort, but to the expansion of what can be felt and thought. An art that does not disturb, that falls silent before the imposition of symbols of power or that embraces neutrality as a virtue ceases to be art and begins to function as merchandise.

The history of humanity confirms that governing complex systems requires far more than imposing silence under the pretext of neutrality. Whenever governance attempts to convert art into a docile and consensual territory, what is produced is not balance but symbolic impoverishment. To yield to such framing is to accept art as a harmless ornament, deprived of risk and of listening.

In this context, the artists’ refusal is not a gratuitous rupture but an act of responsibility. Art does not exist to comfort systems nor to validate power. Its primordial function is to keep the field of listening open, to sustain attention to what insists on emerging and to remind us that where listening closes, life itself begins to contract. © 2026 Vilma Machado