Let me make nine assertions about the kind of thinking and learning the arts promote. The arts help us learn how to attend to qualitative relationships and how to create coherent relationships among them in the absence of rule. One of the fundamental activities that engage those working in any art form is the creation of expressive and satisfying relationships. The composer in the context of music arranges auditory forms that eventually culminate in what might be a sonata, a symphony, an oratorio and the like. The composer's task is to generate and select qualities that express in satisfying ways what sound is capable of expressing.
Visual artists face a similar task.
Each stroke of the brush alters relationships and the task the artist must address is to create relationships among visual qualities that express what the artist intends or what he or she discovers in the course of action. Judgements are made on the basis of somatic knowledge, an awareness in the body of the fit of relationships among sound, if the art form is music, or visual form if it is art. Working in the arts is a way to cultivate the sensibilities and to refine the forms of somatic response that make decisions appropriate in the particular art form with which an individual works. The arts help use learn to be flexibly purposive in order to exploit the unanticipated opportunities that emerge during the course of one's work. One of the features of western rationality is the assumption that goals must always precede means since the appropriateness of means need to be determined by their efficacy in achieving predetermined goals.