Why are some people drawn to minimalist architecture and others to Baroque? Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional make-up lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis. Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere: a painting may be either serene or restless, courageous or careful, modest or confident, masculine or feminine, bourgeois or aristocratic, and our preferences for one kind over another reflect our varied psychological gaps.
We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help return us to a viable mean. We call a work beautiful when it supplies the virtues we are missing, and we dismiss as ugly one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel either threatened or already overwhelmed by. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness. Viewing art from this perspective, de Botton and Armstrong argue, also affords us the necessary self-awareness to understand why we might respond negatively to a piece of art — an insight that might prevent us from reactive disparagement.
Being able to recognize what someone lacks in order to find an artwork beautiful allows us to embody that essential practice of prioritizing understanding over self-righteousness. In this respect, art is also a tuning — and atoning — mechanism for our moral virtues.
But such reactions miss the bigger point:. We might think of works of art that exhort as both bossy and unnecessary, but this would assume an encouragement of virtue would always be contrary to our own desires. In relation to our aspirations to goodness, we suffer from what Aristotle called akrasia , or weakness of will. We want to behave well in our relationships, but slip up under pressure. We want to make more of ourselves, but lose motivation at a critical juncture.
In these circumstances, we can derive enormous benefit from works of art that encourage us to be the best versions of ourselves, something that we would only resent if we had a manic fear of outside intervention, or thought of ourselves as perfect already. The task for artists, therefore, is to find new ways of prying open our eyes to tiresomely familiar, but critically important, ideas about how to lead a balanced and good life.
Art can save us time — and save our lives — through opportune and visceral reminders of balance and goodness that we should never presume we know enough about already.
Art, de Botton and Armstrong suggest, can help shed light on those least explored nooks of our psyche and make palpable the hunches of intuition we can only sense but not articulate:.
We are not transparent to ourselves. We have intuitions, suspicions, hunches, vague musings, and strangely mixed emotions, all of which resist simple definition. Then, from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch on to something we have felt but never recognized clearly before. More than that, they argue, the self-knowledge art bequeaths gives us a language for communicating that to others — something that explains why we are so particular about the kinds of art with which we surround ourselves publicly, a sort of self-packaging we all practice as much on the walls of our homes as we do on our Facebook walls and art Tumblrs.
While the cynic might interpret this as mere showing off, however, de Botton and Armstrong peel away this superficial interpretation to reveal the deeper psychological motive — our desire to communicate to others the subtleties of who we are and what we believe in a way that words might never fully capture.
Besides inviting deeper knowledge of our own selves, art also allows us to expand the boundaries of who we are by helping us overcome our chronic fear of the unfamiliar and living more richly by inviting the unknown :. Engagement with art is useful because it presents us with powerful examples of the kind of alien material that provokes defensive boredom and fear, and allows us time and privacy to learn to deal more strategically with it. An important first step in overcoming defensiveness around art is to become more open about the strangeness that we feel in certain contexts.
One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere. While habit can be a remarkable life-centering force , it is also a double-edged sword that can slice off a whole range of experiences as we fall into autopilot mode. Art can decondition our habituation to what is wonderful and worthy of rejoicing:.
Art is one resource that can lead us back to a more accurate assessment of what is valuable by working against habit and inviting us to recalibrate what we admire or love. The heavy, costly material they are made of makes us newly aware of their separateness and oddity: we see them as though we had never laid eyes on cans before, acknowledging their intriguing identifies as a child or a Martian, both free of habit in this area, might naturally do.
Prior to his suicide, Casagemas had been exhibiting signs of depression and mood swings, accompanied by morphine use. Pichot rejected Casagemas due to his impotence and inability to consummate their relationship. The details of Casagemas and Pichot were known to Picasso and influenced his art, particularly in La Vie. The child, some art critics propose, has its eyes closed not because it is sleeping, but because it is dead.
Casagemas could never have children because of his impotence, and Picasso embraced and immortalized this deep pain on his canvas. The humble subjects of these masterpieces are solemn and Picasso painted them in utter sadness, yet they possess a mysterious beauty within them that has survived many generations of art.
I was just 23 years old when my young, brilliant father died and my own Blue Period arrived. I had recently graduated from college, and engaged to the man of my dreams. Like Picasso losing Casagemas, there was no warning and no farewell. The death stunned our entire small family as we cascaded into hysterical disbelief, followed by a deep and desperate grief.
We were broken and we humbly reached for each other to climb out of our darkness. It was in this Blue Period of mourning for my father when I remembered the words of a favorite philosopher who said that we find light in darkness when we enter into that darkness with others.
The idea seemed to capture the journey through darkness and suffering that I had to undertake. I found a similar hidden virtue buried in my suffering. For the first significant time in my life, I was humbled by pain. But it's a crime no-one talks about. Family stranded in Simpson Desert after campervan bogged on flooded roads. But disaster could strike come March.
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