Art critic and theorist Leo Tolstoy provides a definition of art as the transmission of feeling from one person to another “by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words.” While it is easy to imaging a desire to convey feeling, it is more difficult to construct a compelling argument for a medium for transfer so abstract as movement, lines, colors or sounds. Clear and logical human speech might rightly be favored, except that art’s creation can be traced to the dawn of man, as it is a product of man’s mind.
The human mind can be thought of as the composition of two modes of processing. The “Linear Mode” (L-mode) is responsible for verbal, analytic, rational, and logical functions. In contrast, the “Rich Mode” (R-mode) is responsible for the synthetic, spatial, intuitive, anagogic, and holistic. Even more, these two modes of thought are constantly competing for attention, as only one mode can be “active” at a time (even though both are constantly churning in the background). Though most modern humans spend their day in L-mode, as it is required for such things as verbal comprehension, an entire half of one’s consciousness consists of R-mode processing.
This bit of trivia provides the foundation for an argument of art as the rational medium of expression for irrational thought and feeling. (And it is no small wonder that emotional abstractions such as love have been long elucidated in poem.)
An unrelated side note: While I have been self-teaching programming for a short time, I have hardly achieved the level of proficiency required to declare myself a developer. If, however, anyone desires to look at (what I think is) an interesting project of mine, please feel free to take a gander at FlashCode, my interactive interpreter tutorial inspired by Codecademy.