Art as Therapy Authors Alain De Botton and John Armstrong Contents
Patronizing the Arts
Who's afraid of Alain de Botton? At 43, he'southward already an elderberry in the church of self-help, the master of spinning sugary "secular sermons" out of literature ("How Proust Can Alter Your Life"), philosophy ("The Consolations of Philosophy"), architecture ("The Compages of Happiness"). He has a remarkably guileless face and a friendly, populist vision of fine art. Why then do I go on checking my pockets? And why the grumbles that he condescends to his subjects and regards his readers, as the British writer Lynn Hairdresser put it, equally "ants"?
De Botton'southward new book, "Art as Therapy," written with the historian John Armstrong, begins with grim news. Every mean solar day, honest, upright citizens "leave highly respected museums and exhibitions feeling underwhelmed." Information technology's a scandal, especially since the authors firmly believe art exists to make people "improve versions of themselves." They dream of a day when art tin can exist prescribed for specific "psychological frailties" (including poor memory and pessimism), when museums can be redesigned as gyms for the psyche, group works not by manner merely by the feelings they depict and the muscles they work. Captions will whisper prompts like: "Don't look valuable journeys to exist easy," for Frederic Edwin Church's painting "The Iceberg."
Paradigm 
"Art as Therapy" is handsome and depressing. Information technology lays bare the flaws in de Botton'due south method, importantly that, well, he does regard his readers like ants. How dispiriting information technology is to be told that we cannot appreciate mystery, to see complexity cleared away similar an errant cobweb. True, perverse, playful reductiveness has e'er been de Botton'south shtick — he'due south only never washed information technology so desperately. The grant proposal prose saps all the fun from the proceedings. What should come across as cheeky sounds unhinged: "The truthful aspiration of art should exist to reduce the demand for it"; "Nosotros should revisit the thought of censorship, and potentially consider it . . . as a sincere try to organize the globe for our benefit."
Irritatingly, the authors do have a betoken: in that location is a hunger to believe art has a businesslike purpose in our lives (witness the excitement over studies showing that going to museums makes usa smarter and reading literary fiction makes us more than empathetic). And of course art consoles and nourishes and does everything Armstrong and de Botton say it does. The trouble is that we don't demand them equally middlemen, and we certainly don't demand paintings puréed down to pablum and spoon-fed to us. But Armstrong and de Botton recollect so petty of usa, they design museums like Temple Grandin designed humane slaughterhouses, to minimize our fright and confusion. And in sparing us the horror of feeling "inadequate," they deprive usa of a risk at rapture, to work to possess the work ourselves. (Retrieve the caption on that painting of the iceberg: "Don't expect valuable journeys to be easy.")
I'1000 reminded of the historian Leo Steinberg's 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 matter one imagines actually entices people to look at pictures. Information technology is pocket-size, frank and very funny on the diverseness of feelings an interesting image can arm-twist. Steinberg passes from confusion to contempt to terror ("I am alone with this affair, and information technology is up to me to evaluate it") to a puzzled sort of pleasure. "Information technology is a kind of self-analysis that a new prototype can throw you into and for which I am grateful," he writes. "I am left in a state of anxious uncertainty by the painting, about painting, about myself. And I suspect that this is all right." Information technology is, in fact, wonderful. What would Armstrong and de Botton brand of "Drawer"? "Open yourself to new experiences," mayhap. Worse: "Search within."
Pity; the thought of knowledge as a procedure not a pellet is something that used to affair to de Botton. It'south something he has forgotten (and tin can be forgiven for forgetting; unreliable memory beingness, after all, the start "frailty" mentioned in "Fine art equally 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 Tin Change Your Life." Elstir's message is this: "We cannot be taught wisdom, we take to discover it for ourselves by a journeying which no one can undertake for us, an attempt which no one can spare us." No ane, not fifty-fifty 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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