Art: Some Pros and Cons

Pros:
- It is comfortably universal. 
- It teaches one where/how to find beauty.
- It is fun and aesthetic.
- It is more tactile than just thought.

Cons:
- One can begin to think it is an end and not a means - a vessel to the scenic spots of life. One can idolise it. Etc.
- In the pursuit of style, execution - even content, an artist can lose sight of the fact that if making art is not art, one is already lost. In other words, if the process of making art is not gracious, then the soul is lost, and where there is no soul, there is no life. And what's the point of art if it does not lead back to life. The inherent danger is that one can get lost without even realising it. One thinks: let me just research this a little more, then one gets tangled up in a web of ugly people/ideas who are mean/exhausting. Get out of there! The facts, the style - it might not be the truth. It might not be life. Sometimes perfection needs to be sacrificed for capturing something much more meaningful. Not to say that I have internalised that last point.

Final Count: 
So art can be like a black hole. But the thing is, in the final count, art is necessary as the universal language - along the lines of what Hesse might have been thinking about in the Glass Bead Game: I would say it is not music but art in general that unites all fields. Think of the metaphor. What is science without the metaphor? Think of ancient texts, like Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. Isn't it as much art as it is science and observation and etc? Pictures. Visualisations. That's art. But just like in art, one can get lost in those sciences, and forget that the main point is that (a) they be discovered gracefully and (b) that they lead back to life, to teach us to love life. There can be half-finished science, like a novel with an ending that lies in catastrophe and pessimism. Bad things happen, we need to be able to talk about them (which art encourages, enables), but ideally, art finds resolution. It's just like what a secondary school teacher of mine once said: it is easy to criticize (I add to my students, any fool can do it), but to come up with a solution is the sign of a great mind. The solution can sometimes be a small inner shift, the tiniest shift inside the human soul. But art needs to have this soul, because what else is the sign that we are alive?
One ought to watch out for "art".  Like the 16th Century meaning...