What is the role of art in the world?

At least for us human beings and, I believe for all life here or elsewhere, art is no less than life's need and best attempt to satisfy the spirit. It is nothing less than one of the two most essential functions of life and, for us specifically, of human life. As I understand art, it is anything we do to express something of the totality of our experiences, our knowing, our understanding, our emotions up to any specific point in time. My definition of spirit is merely this - the totality of who and what we are physically and psychologically. It is all that we've experienced, all that we know, all that we understand, all that we feel, all we desire and do not desire, AND all that we express back into our environments. I reject as nonsensical the idea of "spirit" as some ethereal entity trapped in the "merely physical". The nature of "spirit" is physical or it isn't spirit and the source of art is the spirit, is life, or it isn't art and is instead mere chance.

All in all, "art" is one-half of "spirit" which is synonymous with "life" - a specialized function of space and time.

Creative expression, which can have almost limitless quantity and quality of form and function, is one side of the "spirit" coin. To live, for spirit to function and exist, we must not only breath in, we must also breath out. Insatiable curiosity is the inhalation. Obsessive creativity is the exhalation.

Without both, we perish.

The role of art in a human world is no less than the continued existence of human life.