Art as Therapy by Alain De Botton and John Armstrong Download
Patronizing the Arts
Who's afraid of Alain de Botton? At 43, he'due south already an elder in the church of self-assistance, the master of spinning sugary "secular sermons" out of literature ("How Proust Can Alter Your Life"), philosophy ("The Consolations of Philosophy"), architecture ("The Architecture of Happiness"). He has a remarkably guileless confront and a friendly, populist vision of art. Why so exercise I proceed checking my pockets? And why the grumbles that he condescends to his subjects and regards his readers, as the British author Lynn Barber put information technology, as "ants"?
De Botton's new book, "Art as Therapy," written with the historian John Armstrong, begins with grim news. Every 24-hour interval, honest, upright citizens "leave highly respected museums and exhibitions feeling underwhelmed." It'due south a scandal, specially since the authors firmly believe fine art exists to make people "amend versions of themselves." They dream of a day when art can be prescribed for specific "psychological frailties" (including poor memory and pessimism), when museums tin be redesigned as gyms for the psyche, grouping works non past mode but by the feelings they depict and the muscles they work. Captions volition whisper prompts similar: "Don't wait valuable journeys to exist piece of cake," for Frederic Edwin Church building's painting "The Iceberg."
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"Art as Therapy" is handsome and depressing. It lays bare the flaws in de Botton's method, chiefly that, well, he does regard his readers similar ants. How dispiriting it is to be told that we cannot appreciate mystery, to see complexity cleared away similar an errant cobweb. Truthful, perverse, playful reductiveness has always been de Botton'southward shtick — he's just never done it so badly. The grant proposal prose saps all the fun from the proceedings. What should come beyond as derisive sounds unhinged: "The true aspiration of art should exist to reduce the need for it"; "We should revisit the idea of censorship, and potentially consider it . . . as a sincere try to organize the world for our benefit."
Irritatingly, the authors do have a point: at that place is a hunger to believe art has a pragmatic purpose in our lives (witness the excitement over studies showing that going to museums makes us smarter and reading literary fiction makes us more compassionate). And of course art consoles and nourishes and does everything Armstrong and de Botton say it does. The problem is that we don't demand them as middlemen, and we certainly don't need paintings puréed down to pablum and spoon-fed to u.s.a.. But Armstrong and de Botton think so little of united states of america, they blueprint museums like Temple Grandin designed humane slaughterhouses, to minimize our fear and defoliation. And in sparing us the horror of feeling "inadequate," they deprive u.s. of a chance at rapture, to piece of work to possess the work ourselves. (Recall the caption on that painting of the iceberg: "Don't expect valuable journeys to exist piece of cake.")
I'yard reminded of the historian Leo Steinberg'south reaction to Jasper Johns's early work, specifically "Drawer," in which a drawer is embedded in a canvas. Steinberg's essay is an elegant, instructive tantrum, the kind of thing 1 imagines really entices people to expect at pictures. It is modest, frank and very funny on the variety of feelings an interesting prototype can elicit. Steinberg passes from defoliation to contempt to terror ("I am alone with this thing, and it is upwards to me to evaluate it") to a puzzled sort of pleasance. "It is a kind of self-analysis that a new image can throw yous into and for which I am grateful," he writes. "I am left in a state of broken-hearted dubiousness by the painting, most painting, about myself. And I suspect that this is all right." It is, in fact, wonderful. What would Armstrong and de Botton brand of "Drawer"? "Open yourself to new experiences," maybe. Worse: "Search inside."
Pity; the idea of knowledge as a procedure non a pellet is something that used to matter to de Botton. It's something he has forgotten (and can be forgiven for forgetting; unreliable retention being, after all, the first "frailty" mentioned in "Fine art as Therapy"). If de Botton were to consult his Proust again, he'd encounter the painter Elstir, whom he treated tenderly in his breakout book, "How Proust Can Alter Your Life." Elstir'due south message is this: "Nosotros cannot exist taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journeying which no one can undertake for us, an endeavor which no one can spare united states." No ane, not even Alain de Botton.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/books/review/art-as-therapy-by-alain-de-botton-and-john-armstrong.html
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