Just-a-Pause : Thou Art, No Longer Function

Necessity is the mother of invention and imagination is the supreme master of art. What you see in a museum might have served a purpose in the past, but it died and became art. Wherever you look, you see the same pattern.

Take for instance, the candle. How do you measure the value of a candle? You definitely can't measure its value by light output, since the candle has lost its function as a means of lighting a room, unless of course there is a power failure. But seriously, if you come to think of it, the years that followed Thomas Alva Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp might have been called 'The fall of the candle and the rise of the light bulb'.

Yet no romantic dinner is complete without candles on the table. These days, some decorative candles cost more than a light bulb. Yeah!

Another instance is poetry. Before the age of the printed book, poetry was used to pass along stories from one generation to the next. It was much easier to remember a story in rhyme than in prose and then retell it to others. Today, poetry is elevated to an art form. Its communication function has been lost.

In a similar vein, prior to photography, painting was used to communicate the likeness of kings and queens. Paintings also let the next generation know what the pervious ones looked like. Paintings also played an important part to communicate, before the written alphabet came into its own. Today, paintings are in art form and what's more? Most of them are divorced from reality! But for art's sake, it frees the emotions and makes the ordinary things of life special.

Now, we have all heard of this saying: Live by the sword and die by the sword. The sword was an important instrument of war and helped in winning many a battle. But that was before the gun was invented. Today it adorns walls as a piece of art. Although we don't hear "Live by the Gun and die by the Gun" ...do we?

Another piece to go the art way is the huge Grandfather's clock, which has shrunk into a micro electronic time-piece, to ease the space crunch.

Bullock-carts and horses were the mode of transportation before the automobiles came in. Today they are seen around, but only at bullock-cart races, horse races, horse jumping shows and the tongas (horse chariots) at entertainment places that children feel excited to ride on. It's a different question altogether that these same vehicles are the cause of pollution and global warming.

The evolution of life makes it impossible for anything to endure for very long. Ultimately, with the movement of civilization, some things break away from its original utility. It is then rebuilt in our imagination and taken beyond its conventional function. When something looses its functional purpose, it automatically turns into art form.

Perhaps, the only place where art turns into function is in the proverbial 'marital bed'!