You have reached the website of the Artists Revolutionary Party (ARP), Humanity's last, best hope.
 Home
hy an artist and not an athlete or an actor (or a singer or a...?) We'll tell you why. Artists are special. Especially painters. Shelley once said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, but he was wrong. Painters are. 

We don't mean that in some vague poetic manner, we mean it in the most concrete and realistic of senses  Seriously, the whole purpose for civilization is to coddle and maintain its artists.  We'll prove it to you.

You are most likely reading this on a computer screen or your telephone. At the heart of both technology and telecommunications are the twin foundations of the 19th century Industrial Revolution: telegraphy and the practical steam engine. Without those two innovations, you would be reading this by a lamp lit with whale oil. Now, the funny thing about both these innovations is they were both invented by artists; specifically, by painters. We're not talking about wannabe jack-of-all-trades repaint-your-furniture artists, we're talking established, successful painters who dabbled in steam engines and telegraphy as a sideline. Robert Fulton, inventor of the first practical steam engine, was a noted portrait miniaturist.




Morse was even more successful. This is probably his most famous painting, the Gallery of the Louvre (1833):


Not good enough for you? How about Galileo Galilei, founder of, well, modern science as we know it. Polymath, physicist, mathematician, engineer.


Watercolorist.



Take our word for it, these are very good. Galileo's training in visual art techniques gave him the perceptual equipment to correctly interpret what she saw through his telescope lens.  His art background gave him the conceptual foundations that lead directly to the scientific method.

Then there Leonardo. Leonardo's accomplishments stretch across so many fields—anatomy, mathematics, avionics, hydrodynamics, civil engineering, optics,military science, mechanical engineering—it's hard to find a subject in which Leonardo
didn't make a seminal contribution. Artists in general led the development of modern anatomy and hence medicine. Without artists, doctors would still be dissecting dogs and diagnosing from a cloth doll.

Scratch an innovation and find an artist. More specifically, find a painter. I'd go so far as to suggest that the conceptual leap that led to agriculture—the idea that nature could be made subject to human control—arises from the magical aspects of cave painting.
But this is all circumstantial. How can we test this hypothesis? Well, let's look at cultures that have actually rejected artistic expression, cultures like the Hasidim, or the Pennsylvania Dutch.



Both are frozen in time, like a fly in amber, at the very moment the society rejected the visual arts, the 18th century for the Hasids, the 19th for the Amish.

Artists are the means by which new ideas enter the Arena of Discourse from the Region  of Archetypes. No artists, no new ideas, simple as that. Society does not create art. Artists create society.

Art is not merely essential, it is quintessential.

Back to Top
The goal of the Artists Revolutionary Party is to make the world safe for artists.
EMailInternational PolicyWhy an Artist?
Artists Revolutionary Party, Humanity's last, best hope.