Believing that the arts are not essential is apparently a contentious viewpoint

After reading yet another article about how essential art and culture are to humanity, despite the impossibility of pinning down any economic benefits, I'm still not totally sold on the idea.

I know it's the conventional wisdom, at least in progressive liberal circles. But it just rings slightly false to me. It seems to me that art and culture are just a nice-to-haves, not a sine qua non of human life. I like music, plays and movies as much as the next guy (the plastics arts perhaps less so), but they strike me as middle (and upper) class pastimes, and hardly essential to life as we know it. 

This will perhaps be anathema to many, but is art important to a homeless guy or a cancer victim or a displaced migrant in a war zone? Surely, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that. Even during the pandemic, intellectuals were arguing that we need to keep up funding for the arts, otherwise we would, well, lose our humanity in some poorly-articulated way. But what people really needed was help with their rent, protection of their jobs, and vaccines.

So, the question has been asked before, ad nauseam, but what is the value of art? Is it a basic human right? Or can we actually do without it? A quick Google search for "is art and culture really that important?" yields a myriad links, almost all affirming that art is indeed an important, nay, essential, part of our lives. Even a more negative search for "art and culture is not essential to humanity" yields pretty much the same set of views (in fact, most of the same articles as the first search).

Among the many purported justifications of this view are things like: "It is the medium through which we process our emotions and ideas"; "it is an important tool for learning, teaching and communicating"; "art can cross cultural boundaries as it can be understood in any language and all social groups"; "art and culture can help us rethink time"; "arts and culture help create and maintain stable, peaceful societies"; "art makes life more manageable, tolerable and enjoyable"; "art is an essential part of the human experience"; "it promotes expression and creativity"; "it helps all of us develop necessary soft skills"; "it provides historical context"; "it gives us a place to gather as a society"; etc, etc. Oh, and that old chestnut, "without the arts, we are a species; with the arts, we are a civilization". Hmm.

Hell, even polls back up this impression. A 2019 Ipsos poll found that over 90% of Americans believe that the arts are an important part of the education system, that 80% say it is important for adults to continue to have access to arts education outside of school, and that 79% believe that arts education is important to society and that it will continue to be so in the future. A 2018 public opinion survey found that large pluralities believe that the arts provide meaning to our lives, that arts institutions add value to our communities, and even that most would vote for political candidates who seek to increase funding of the arts.

You get the idea. But all of this sounds distinctly woolly and unscientific to me. Much of it also sounds like self-serving propaganda from, well, artists and intellectuals. (Plus, it is a large stretch to go from believing that the arts are have a beneficial effect to asserting that they are absolutely essential.) Is there anything a bit more rigorous and objective? Even a dissenting view?

I had to try the very negative search for "no, art is not essential to humanity" before I could find anything even approaching my own views. For example, an open letter entitled,"I am an artist and I believe that art is not essential", which contains such assertions as "to have art in your life is a bonus not a necessity", "only the privileged can actively pursue the arts", and "art has no direct effect on survival". For example, an eNotes Expert Answer from a "certified educator", which includes the hard-to-refute but rather basic defences: "food, water, shelter clothing ... are arguably the only things we actually need, that are essential to our survival"; "humans are the only creatures that create art, and in the animal and plant kingdoms, they do not have art and they continue to survive just fine".

Maybe I could find more (and better) apologies if I tried hard, but it is apparent that my view that art is not essential is a contentious, minority viewpoint. But I would still contend that the reason it appears so is that only artists snd intellectuals have bothered to broach the subject online. Those homeless guys, cancer victims and war refugees didn't quite get around to it, it not being a major priority for them.