Art as Therapy

1. Art as Therapy: A Tool for Psychological Well-being

Art can be a tool, and we need to focus more clearly on what kind of tool it is — and what good it can do for us.

Extending Capacities. Art, like any tool, extends our capabilities beyond our natural endowments, compensating for psychological frailties. It serves as a therapeutic medium, guiding, exhorting, and consoling viewers, enabling them to become better versions of themselves. This perspective shifts the focus from art as a mere aesthetic object to art as a functional instrument for mental and emotional health.

Addressing Frailties. The book identifies seven psychological frailties that art can help address: poor memory, loss of hope, feelings of isolation, emotional imbalance, lack of self-knowledge, rejection of new experiences, and desensitization to the everyday. By understanding these frailties, we can better appreciate art's potential to heal and improve our lives. Art serves as a mirror, reflecting back to us the parts of ourselves that need attention and care.

Beyond the Establishment. The book critiques the art establishment's reluctance to define art's purpose, arguing that this reluctance weakens our relationship with art. It advocates for a more direct and accessible approach to art, one that emphasizes its therapeutic potential and encourages viewers to engage with art in a personal and meaningful way. This approach empowers individuals to use art as a tool for self-discovery and personal growth.

2. Art as Remembrance: Preserving Precious Moments

Art helps us accomplish a task that is of central importance in our lives: to hold on to things we love when they are gone.

Combating Forgetting. Our minds are prone to losing important information, both factual and sensory. Art serves as a powerful tool for remembering, capturing the essence of experiences and people we cherish. This function is exemplified by the story of Dibutades, who traced her lover's shadow to preserve his image before his departure.

Capturing Essence. Good art goes beyond mere representation, capturing the personality and essence of its subject. Vermeer's "Woman in Blue Reading a Letter" is cited as an example of how art can commemorate the appropriate details, conveying the sitter's capacity for absorption and her quiet intensity. The best art manages to foreground the elements that are valuable but hard to hold on to.

Clouds and Emotions. Constable's cloud studies invite us to concentrate on the distinctive textures and shapes of individual clouds, intensifying the emotional meaning of the soundless drama that unfolds daily above our heads. Art edits down complexity and helps us to focus, albeit briefly, on the most meaningful aspects. Art, therefore, acts as a bucket, helping us to contain and carry the precious water of experience.

3. Art as Hope: Cultivating Optimism and Idealism

Cheerfulness is an achievement, and hope is something to celebrate.

Combating Excessive Gloom. The book challenges the notion that pretty pictures feed sentimentality and numb us to injustice, arguing that most of the time we suffer from excessive gloom. It asserts that cheerfulness is an achievement and hope is something to celebrate, as optimism is an important ingredient of success. The dancers in Matisse's painting put us in touch with a blithe, carefree part of ourselves that can help us cope with inevitable rejections and humiliations.

Idealism as a Virtue. Idealization in art has a bad name because it seems to involve endowing something or someone with virtues more glowing than they actually possess, while disguising any imperfections with polish and subterfuge. However, strategic exaggerations of what is good can perform the critical function of distilling and concentrating the hope we need to chart a path through the difficulties of life.

Beauty and Tears. The most striking feature of the small ivory statuette of the Virgin is the face, a face of welcome, the kind of look we hope to receive when someone is unreservedly glad to see us. Beauty can make the actual ugliness of existence all the harder to bear. The more difficult our lives, the more a graceful depiction of a flower might move us.

4. Art as Catharsis: Finding Dignity in Sorrow

Rather than be alone with such moods, the work proclaims them as central and universal features of life.

Normalizing Sorrow. Art can teach us how to suffer more successfully. Richard Serra's "Fernando Pessoa" encourages a profound engagement with sadness, declaring the normality of sorrow. The large scale and overtly monumental character of the work constitute a declaration of the normality of sorrow.

Sublimation of Sorrow. Artistic achievement can be seen as 'sublimated' sorrow on the part of the artist, and in turn, in its reception, on the part of the audience. The term sublimation refers to the psychological processes of transformation, in which base and unimpressive experiences are converted into something noble and fine. Many sad things become worse because we feel we are alone in suffering them.

Finding Honor in Suffering. Nan Goldin's work, filled with a generous attentiveness towards the lives of its subjects, offers a grand and serious vantage point from which to survey the travails of our condition. Art can offer a grand and serious vantage point from which to survey the travails of our condition. These works make us aware of our insignificance, exciting a pleasing terror and a sense of how petty man’s disasters are in comparison with the ways of eternity, leaving us a little readier to bow to the incomprehensible tragedies that every life entails.

5. Art as Rebalancing: Restoring Emotional Equilibrium

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.

Compensating for Imbalances. Art can put us in touch with concentrated doses of our missing dispositions, restoring a measure of equilibrium to our inner selves. For example, someone leading a frantic life might find solace in the symmetrical order of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House. Our tastes depend on what spectrum of our emotional make-up lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis.

Emotional and Moral Atmosphere. 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 reflects our varied psychological gaps. We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help return us to a viable mean.

Naive and Sentimental Poetry. The German poet, playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller developed this idea in an essay, ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’, published in 1796. He was curious about the fact that in ancient Greece, artists and dramatists had paid little attention to landscape. As life becomes more complex and artificial, as life is lived more indoors, the longing for a compensating natural simplicity gets stronger.

6. Art as Self-Understanding: Discovering Inner Truths

Art builds up self knowledge, and is an excellent way of communicating the resulting fruit to other people.

Mirrors to the Soul. We are not transparent to ourselves, but from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch on to something we have felt but never recognized clearly before. Joseph Cornell's "Untitled (Medici Princess)" presents a model of how one might coordinate the diverse elements of a single identity. The box says, 'I am made of a web of relationships.'

Elusive Moods. Contemplating Cy Twombly's dark, scratchy, suggestive surface is rather like looking in a mirror in which you notice an aspect of your appearance you had not paid much attention to before, except that what's at stake here is not a row of molars, but your inner experience. Twombly's work is like a specially designed mirror of a part of our inner lives, deliberately constructed to draw attention to it and to make it clearer and easier to identify.

Communicating the Ineffable. Christen Kobke's unassuming depiction of an afternoon in a suburb of Copenhagen latches onto just those aspects of experience that are so hard to verbalize. The light in the picture is tremendously meaningful, even though it is difficult to say what this meaning is. We are also, in the case of certain prized examples, a bit like them. They are the media through which we come to know ourselves, and let others know more of what we are really about.

7. Art as Growth: Overcoming Defensiveness

Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things.

Confronting Alien Material. Many prestigious examples of art can leave us feeling scared or bored. 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.

Overcoming Defensiveness. An important first step in overcoming defensiveness around art is to become more open about the strangeness that we feel in certain contexts. We shouldn’t hate ourselves for it; a lot of art is, after all, the product of world views that are radically at odds with our own. The second step is to make oneself more at home with the seemingly alien mindsets of people who created some of the world’s most revered works of art.

Strategic Engagement. A third step on the path towards resolving defensive responses is to look out for points of connection, however fragile and initially tenuous, between the mindset of the artist and our own. Although their work may seem very odd, there is likely to be an aspect of their ambitions that we can, with sufficient self-exploration, relate to in a personal way. Encounters with art that seem initially offputting offer us lessons in psychological growth.

8. Art as Appreciation: Re-sensitizing to the Everyday

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.

Combating Habituation. We find it hard to take note of what is always around, losing sight of the value of what is before us and yearning for the imagined attractions of elsewhere. 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.

Finding Beauty in the Mundane. Jasper Johns' "Painted Bronze" encourages us to see beer cans afresh, recognizing the elegance of their design. Ben Nicholson's "1943 (painting)" is a testament to the basic pleasures of simple things, lifting moods and moments of happy concentration into the public realm.

Reconciling with Our Condition. Chardin's "A Lady Taking Tea" makes this ordinary occasion, and the simple furnishings, seductive. It invites the beholder to go home and create their own live version. It lies in the power of art to honor the elusive but real value of ordinary life. It can teach us to be more just towards ourselves as we endeavor to make the best of our circumstances.

9. Art and Love: Cultivating the Qualities of a Good Lover

To define a mission for art, then, one of its tasks is to teach us to be good lovers: lovers of rivers and lovers of skies, lovers of motorways and lovers of stones. And — very importantly — somewhere along the way, lovers of people.

Guiding Emotions. Culture, including art, is one of the central mechanisms by which we guide our emotions. It is the music we listen to, the films we see, the buildings we inhabit and the paintings, sculptures and photographs that hang on our walls that function as our subtle guides and educators.

Sensitizing to Appeal. Oscar Wilde formulated a maxim that applied La Rochefoucauld’s idea about love to art: “There was no fog in London until Whistler started painting it.” Great art has the power to sensitize us to the appeal of diners by the American roadside (Edward Hopper); the richness of velvet against skin (Titian); the grandeur of modern industry (Andreas Gursky) or the resonance of artfully arranged stones in the landscape (Richard Long).

Qualities of a Good Lover. Knowing how to love someone is different from admiring them. It’s then we need to draw on qualities that seldom spring forth naturally and almost invariably benefit from a little practice: an ability to listen properly to another person, patience, curiosity, resilience, sensuality and reason. Art can be a useful guide to such qualities.

10. Art and Nature: Reconnecting with the Natural World

Art is a record of good observation and encourages us to follow its spirit, even if only a few of us end up replicating its products.

Reconsidering Value. We are so familiar with the idea that nature is attractive that it can be a struggle to recollect that often in the history of humanity, and in our own experience too, it hasn’t seemed at all obvious that it is worth admiring. Art is a record of good observation and encourages us to follow its spirit, even if only a few of us end up replicating its products.

Dignifying Walks. Hamish Fulton's work conveys the dignity he rightly feels that his walks, and ours, deserve. He wants us to recognize that some walks can be central events in our lives; our inner transitions assisted by our outer wanderings. Corot gets us to appreciate a sense of enclosure; we feel the grassy hill rising above us and we are alive to the stillness.

The South as a State of Mind. Elizabeth David preserved the south in casserole dishes. In early nineteenth-century Prussia, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel sought to preserve it in bricks and mortar. The question for them, and for us, is how to keep hold of some of the fulfilment we have found in southern lands. How might one lay claim on an ongoing basis to the virtues of the south when one is back in the north?

11. Art and Society: Reforming Capitalism Through Taste

At its heart, the economic system we call capitalism involves the pursuit of profit through the sale of goods and services in a market in which consumers can make purchases as they choose.

Failures of Consumer Choice. Many of the problems of capitalism boil down to failures of consumer choice, or taste. If we lament the vulgarity of a Las Vegas casino complex, or shudder at the thought of the quality of the meat in low-cost burgers, we should refrain from simply condemning the owners and managers of the businesses that provide them.

The Role of the Critic. The task of the private gallery is a serious one: to connect purchasers with the art they need. The chief skill required for running a gallery should therefore be not salesmanship, but the ability to diagnose what is missing from the inner life of the client. The art dealer should strive to identify what kind of art a person needs to rebalance themselves, and then meet that need as efficiently as possible.

Enlightened Capitalism. What we are aiming for is enlightened capitalism: a system within which businesses remain sufficiently attuned to economic reality to be profitable and to sustain and increase their own Agents without needing outside support, but also stay focused on providing optimal goods and services. It means a business culture devoted to what is genuinely worthwhile and admirable as well as to the many disciplines required to flourish in a competitive marketplace.

12. Art and Purpose: Aligning Career with Meaning

Genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on.

The Search for Meaning. As economies develop, so a troubling ambition arises in many of its most educated and driven workers. It is no longer enough that a job merely pays a living wage; it should also, ideally, prove to be meaningful. A meaningful job should feel aligned with our own deepest talents and interests.

Learning from Artists. In moments of confusion, the career of an artist can seem attractive, and, perhaps more often than is wise, inspire the hope that we could one day try to become artists ourselves. The ambition to be creative has taken many a young person by the throat and never let them go.

Constructive Envy. We should be wise to apply a little patience, realizing that confusions about one’s direction are a necessary part of a legitimate search for an authentic working life. Rather than evidence that one is doomed, feeling lost is the necessary first stage of a fruitful quest. Every person we envy holds out a piece of the jigsaw about our possible later achievements.

Last updated: April 24, 2025