Universal language

Art, in all its diverse manifestations, from storytelling to picture-making, from singing and dancing to poetry, is as distinctive and universal an activity of the human mind as language. It is, in essence, a way of thinking about the world, of shaping experience as it is felt to be and reshaping it as it could be, that long predates the development of rational reflection. Stories have been told for thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands; philosophical and scientific thought begins, for practical purposes, around 2500 years ago. The invention of logical reasoning did not bring about the end of art, for the precision of logic is gained at the cost of a severe narrowing of the aperture through which we consider experience; the complexities of the world as we encounter it have to be replaced with the simplicity of concepts in a play of intellectual abstractions comparable to a game of chess. Art, which deals with life in its immediate phenomenological form, has continued to be a way of thinking about dimensions of feeling and sensibility that are not amenable to rational analysis. In some respects, this is as true now as it has been at any time over the last couple of millennia, and yet as the march of rational thought has progressed from theory into practice, from the scientific revolution to the industrial revolution and succeeding waves of technological innovation, art has become increasingly detached from everyday life. The trouble begins with the Romantic period, when artists began to see themselves as outsiders and bohemians; the avant-garde was a myth masking a reality of increasing alienation. First art spoke for the values of a society, then it spoke against them, then it spoke to no one at all. That is about where we stand today. The great art of the world is collected in museums, which can be regarded either as temples to beauty or as its morgues. The contemporary art scene, meanwhile, is increasingly run as a profitable, if speculative, industry. The oppositional and contestatory finale to the culture of the avant-garde, in the political art of fifty or sixty years ago, survives today only as marketing rhetoric, and the reality is that contemporary art is used as an investment class for the new rich, as a branding strategy by the corporate world, and as a proxy for cultural vitality by governments who build contemporary art centres as secular cathedrals. It is precisely in such a context that Alain de Botton and John Armstrong’s book invites us to reconsider art and the role it may play in our lives, and it should be said at once that their work has the great merit of looking at its subject from a perspective outside the institutions that act as a straitjacket on the making, display, selling, and discussion of art today. Ignoring, or rising above, the relentless self-referentiality of the art world, the authors consider the potential contribution of art to the good life; how it might help us in our quest to lead a sane, ethical, and enlightened existence. Hence the title, which at first can seem almost shocking. But Art as Therapy has nothing to do with offering the mentally ill an outlet for their distress through expressive painting. It is about how art can help all of us to be more aware of our own feelings and their significance, more hopeful when we tend to be despondent, more self-critical and realistic, more aware of others and sensitive to their needs, more conscious of death and mortality, and yet capable of contemplating our own end in a broader perspective of time and the great cycles of nature. The authors are certainly right in emphasising the human meaning of works, whether of painting or of literature, which can so easily be lost in the academic obsession with circumstantial details. They also draw our attention to the crucial fact that art does not mirror realities but aspirations: the Gothic cathedrals are not evidence that people in the thirteenth century were universally pious and spiritual; they are rather testimony to a great longing for spirituality. Similarly the equilibrium and serenity of Poussin’s paintings do not tell us that life in seventeenth-century Rome was harmonious, but, if anything, that it was the reverse, a dynamic, dangerous environment in which wisdom and serenity were ideals to be striven for. His pictures allow the viewer to conceive, visualise, and perhaps enact such objectives. From such a perspective, the authors consider what kind of art is needed in our own time, how it should be commissioned and displayed, and how it may help us both individually and collectively. One of their more radical ideas is that museums should be re-organised not according to chronology, civilisation, or media, but according to sensibility and theme: there could be a gallery of tenderness, for example, in which each work would help to awaken the viewer’s sensibility to this quality in his or her own relations with others. The most serious problem with the museological proposal is the difficulty of encountering works in their aesthetic specificity when they are set beside others that are incompatible in style or material form. In general, it is easier to perceive the qualities of works of art when they are in the company of things like themselves. But perhaps this hypothetical rearrangement can be taken as a kind of thought experiment, rather than as a practical proposal – even if it may in fact inspire certain useful thematic rehangings. Why not, for example, a room of seventeenth-century paintings related to the neo-stoic philosophy that inspired artists from Rubens to Poussin? In the end, indeed, we realise that in the very process of explaining how art can lead us to a better understanding of the things that matter in life, the authors have in fact taken us on just such a journey. The book itself, in its reflection on art, becomes the occasion of a salutary – intellectually therapeutic – philosophical meditation.

Christopher Allen

From the New Issue

Fat Chance: Journalism poems by Kent MacCarter

The Cancer Finishing School: Lessons in laughter, love and resilience by Peter Goldsworthy

‘“Thin labourism”: How is the Albanese government travelling?’ by Frank Bongiorno

Saving Lieutenant Kennedy: The heroic story of the Australian who helped rescue JFK by Brett Mason

You May Also Like

Whiteley on Trial by Gabriella Coslovich

Out of Australia: Prints and Drawings from Sidney Nolan to Rover Thomas by Stephen Coppel

A Beautiful Line: Italian Prints from Mantegna to Piranesi by Maria Zagala

Heaven on Earth: Painting and the life to come by T.J. Clark