The Power of Art in a Political Age
Searching for beauty as the world turns ugly.
...Artists generally don't set out to improve other people; they just want to create a perfect expression of their experience. But their art has the potential to humanize the beholder. How does it do this?
First, beauty impels us to pay a certain kind of attention. It startles you and prompts you to cast off the self-centered tendency to always be imposing your opinions on things. It prompts you to stop in your tracks, take a breath and open yourself up so that you can receive what it is offering, often with a kind of childlike awe and reverence. It trains you to see the world in a more patient, just and humble way. In "The Sovereignty of Good," the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch writes that "virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is."
Second, artworks widen your emotional repertoire. When you read a poem or see a piece of sculpture, you haven't learned a new fact, but you've had a new experience. The British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, "The listener to Mozart's Jupiter symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain."
These experiences furnish us with a kind of emotional knowledge — how to feel and how to express feelings, how to sympathize with someone who is grieving, how to share the satisfaction of a parent who has seen her child grow.
Third, art teaches you to see the world through the eyes of another, often a person who sees more deeply than you do. Sure, Picasso's "Guernica" is a political piece of art, about an atrocity in the Spanish Civil War, but it doesn't represent, documentarylike, an exact scene in that war. It goes deeper to give us an experience of pure horror, the universal experience of suffering, and the reality of human bloodlust that leads to it... David Brooks
Searching for beauty as the world turns ugly.
...Artists generally don't set out to improve other people; they just want to create a perfect expression of their experience. But their art has the potential to humanize the beholder. How does it do this?
First, beauty impels us to pay a certain kind of attention. It startles you and prompts you to cast off the self-centered tendency to always be imposing your opinions on things. It prompts you to stop in your tracks, take a breath and open yourself up so that you can receive what it is offering, often with a kind of childlike awe and reverence. It trains you to see the world in a more patient, just and humble way. In "The Sovereignty of Good," the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch writes that "virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is."
Second, artworks widen your emotional repertoire. When you read a poem or see a piece of sculpture, you haven't learned a new fact, but you've had a new experience. The British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, "The listener to Mozart's Jupiter symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain."
These experiences furnish us with a kind of emotional knowledge — how to feel and how to express feelings, how to sympathize with someone who is grieving, how to share the satisfaction of a parent who has seen her child grow.
Third, art teaches you to see the world through the eyes of another, often a person who sees more deeply than you do. Sure, Picasso's "Guernica" is a political piece of art, about an atrocity in the Spanish Civil War, but it doesn't represent, documentarylike, an exact scene in that war. It goes deeper to give us an experience of pure horror, the universal experience of suffering, and the reality of human bloodlust that leads to it... David Brooks
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