Essay outline: "Art has little practical value in today's society." What is your view?

"Art has little practical value in today's society." What is your view? 

Definition: 

Art - Expression or application of human creative skill and imagination. Appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power 

Practical value - Value of, involving, or concerned with experience or actual use; not theoretical 

Today's society - Nowadays, recently, near future 


Stand:  I disagree that art has little practical value in today's society. 


TS 1: Arts enhances education especially in our advanced society where new generation of students are technologically-inclined. 

Examples: 

- Use of music/movie to learn Chinese as compared to relying on Textbooks
- Visual arts to enhance learning experience (e.g In Singapore now, most schools adopt the Learning Management System also known as LMS to upload videos to help the students understand certain concepts) 

TS 2:  Art have real world physical application in today's society. What we are studying today are actually written by historians, poets and writers who captured the essences of nature and relationships which leads to our growing understanding of the human relationship and condition.  

Examples: 

- In today's society, we emphasized a lot of the interaction between different groups of people due to globalisation. People from all over the countries are able to interact easily with the advancement in technology. With arts, we are able to better understand the relationship between different groups of people as seen from the study of history. Hence, with arts, we are more able to apply the skills of interacting and understanding while we meet other people from different backgrounds, minimizing the likely conflict in the future due to miscommunication. 

TS 3: In today's society, art is definitely practical because art can foster the kind of innovation that the economy could ultimately benefit from. 

-Workers with arts-related skills are critical to the industries of the new economy: software development and web design; advertising firms; automobile design companies; architectural and engineering firms; and other fields seeking employees with high-level communication, computer, and creative problem-solving abilities.

-Support of the arts is a workforce issue for companies—the arts develop the kind of thinker and manager that businesses must have more of if they are to remain competitive in the global marketplace.

-For example, a third of all Fortune 500 CEOs have liberal arts degrees. Leslie Moonves, who leads CBS, has a degree in Spanish from Bucknell University, and Howard Schultz, Starbucks' CEO, majored in communications at Northern Michigan.

COUNTER TS 4: However, some have argued that art is just a hobby or just for entertainment. In addition there is the perspective of art as being the pastime of the elite. What people seem to value now are pursuits that have the most economic and commercial value and not art. 

Example: 

- Sticker lady incident in Singapore (Show that most people find art impractical and unlikely to support creativity through art, to them, art is just a form of expression with little value) 
- In today's society, most do not emphasize on arts. Instead, they emphasize on science and technology instead to move their economy forward as they view art as having little practical value and would not contribute much to economic growth and advancement.