What would the world look like without visual arts

Welcome to the first blog of my ‘What would the world look like without…’ series. In each blog I’ll be exploring what the world might look like without a different form of art.

Now it’s important to begin that the word ‘art’ can mean a different thing to different people; to some ‘art’ is something visually pleasing, to some it’s a job, to some it’s a way to experience the world, and to others a whole host of other things.

When I talk about the arts, I am talking about anything to do with the application of creativity and imagination. So basically, my definition of what the arts involve is continually changing and evolving.

Earth without art is just eh – Demetri Martin

In this blog, I will be talking about what the world may look like without the visual arts.

The visual arts consist of what we see; it is arguably the most closely associated to the definition of the arts. It can include paintings, sculptures, photography, architecture and many other forms.

The first evidence of visual art that has ever been found was a cave painting, the Sulawesi warty pig cave painting, to be exact. You may have seen that I’ve made a reference to this painting a few times now in my social media takeover, both in the arts prompt on Monday and the arts awareness post yesterday.

The point I was trying to make was that the arts have been around for over a millennium, over 45 millennia to be exact.

So as for the question, “what would the world look like without visual art?”, let’s take a look at some examples.

Example 2

We can say goodbye to all the forms of art within visual art. So we can say goodbye to painting, sketching those fun doodles in the corner of our homework and writing. Yep, writing counts as a visual art. So no more poetry and no more books (a stab in the heart to bookworms like me).

Example 4

Goodbye smartphones, TVs, cars, any invention you can think of… electricity, wooden carts, toothbrushes. They all took someone with a strong imagination and some degree of artistic ability. For example, wood carving to give us wheels and metal work to give us smartphones and TVs.

Example 5

Well I don’t think I need to keep listing things, I think you get the point now!

In conclusion

Without visual art, we wouldn’t be living the same life that we do today. The world wouldn’t look the same either.

There would be no cave paintings to discover, no banksy art to gush over and no new inventions to help anyone.

It seems like a grim world to live in, right?