Last night while watching a TV interview of Amir Khan, I heard his views about art, his art and I realized why people call him Mr. Perfectionist.

According to him, the basic principle of arts is to provide entertainment, but if the artist can provoke thoughts in the audience for progress, for change, if the art promotes the viewer to “think” then it is better art.
I do not think that entertainment is the basic purpose of arts.
Art, any kind of art be it a painting, sculpture, literature, music, dance or acting is the selective expression of reality, it is an exercise of integrating the abstract ideas about life and existence and expressing them. Entertainment is an essential by-product of the arts; it is not the main purpose of the arts though.
The artist exhibits his ideas and value judgments about reality and the sense of existence through his art, his work, and it needs a great extent of integrity on behalf of the artist as an Individual.
May be that is why Amir Khan is famous for his search for perfection and integrity.
Well, the way Amir chooses his projects and the depth he likes to get involved with the characters he plays on the celluloid, clarifies his understanding of arts, Arts, as a means to objectively express whatever is his thinking, and he stand by.
Whenever an artist takes his profession in arts, as a means to objectively put across his thinking and perceptions about a particular subject and provides a reasonable sequence to integrate the thought process about an issue, a light entertaining situation, or a drastic problem, it becomes a masterpiece of arts.
Quite often, the artists who involves with their profession so deeply, appears to be obsessed with their approach towards their art.
Luckily, Indian plethora got many such obsessed artists who kept sparkling from time to time to exhilarate the Bollywood celluloid.
From the excellence of Guru Dutt, to serene yet strong acts of Balraj Sahni, from the youthful exuberance of Kishor Kumar to gracious presentation of Amitabh, Bollywood provided a stream of artists who worked on the simple definition of arts, Art as “the selective recreation of reality”.
Now a piece of arts provides full freedom for the viewer to deduct his own meaning from it. The artist do conveys a strong message through his art in a distinctive way clearly showcasing his own thought process about a particular subject, discussing the various reason for the deductible conclusion of his art piece, yet, he provides full freedom for the viewer or the audience to think more and further.
While watching an old sculpture of Natraj, someone may feel the spiritual essence the artist wanted to convey, on the other hand, some other person may enjoy the simple presentation of Human Power along with agility portrayed by the sculpture.
It is because of this freedom, which the artist provides to the audience that he cannot be restricted from expressing whatever he thinks about any particular subject.
If some Deepa Mehta makes a movie (like Water) on a social issue, she only expresses her own Individual view point about a topic in an objective way. The audience can disprove it, but since the artist never exploited the freedom of the audience to have his own perception about the topic, the audience also does not hold any right to ban or restrict that piece of art.
Artistic immensity is measured by the artist’s ability to express his thought process about a subject or story objectively. His thought process may be reasonably right or it can be wrong too.
Talking about Amir Khan, he has presented many shades of arts and character.
Some of the characters he played exposes a sound reasonable metaphysical philosophy well-established on ethics of liberty and Individual freedom, while some other characters shows the extent of stupidity a person can achieve if he ignores the reason. Yet, what makes Amir Khan one of the best artist of Bollywood is, his integrity and obsession towards expressing meaningful objectification of his own thoughts and values, which are important to him, because he chose them.
This is something, which I find common in almost all great artists of any stream.
They all remain very selective about their work and they all devote themselves completely to express what they think about an issue or a story and provide a space of freedom to the audience to either to accept the idea about the issue behind the art piece or to reject it. They all produce thought-provoking art.

“Art is inextricably tied to man’s survival”
“Of all human products, art is perhaps the most important”
Ayn Rand!