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Philosopher Ethan Hawke on Why Art Matters
“So you have to ask yourself, do you think human creativity matters?”
“Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry,” a video clip began.
An American heartthrob is graying at the temples and I brace myself for some lightweight celebrity wisdom. Sigh. He’s going to pontificate about dying art forms.
Not all celebrities are vapid mannequins waxing philosophic. Plenty are voracious readers and deep thinkers and big-hearted creatives. But when a silver-screen leading man sounds like he’s contrasting himself against the artless masses, my first thought was, What’s this dude going to teach me, bestow upon me about art that I didn’t learn better from literature professors or Monet posters in middle school or the museums in Paris or my six-year-old niece’s drawings?
A lot, it turns out. Fame and fortune don’t necessarily numb you to everyday beauty and our shared humanity. So this is your unsolicited reminder that “most people”, myself included, are, sometimes, unduly cynical.
“Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry,” he starts. Stay with me (him.) Most people don’t have time to! I mentally chide him, lamenting the cost of living and working in America, “the greatest country on Earth.”
