What We Create So We Can Understand
Every year on my birthday, I take myself to an art museum. I love wandering massive rooms filled with historic scenery, remembered people, and iconic translations of the world and art itself. I marvel at the patience and passion capsuled in these works, enamored by how they’ve lasted through the decades. Though this yearly tradition is dear to my heart, there’s one problem.
Museums are often filled with stolen art and artifacts, focus heavily on white artists, and help enforce the elitist idea that art can only be accessed by those who can afford it.
I recently finished the book “Art as Therapy” by Alain de Bottom and John Armstrong, and I believe that every artists and art enthusiast should read it. It explores how the art world has completely destroyed the meanings behind artistic works and how we must appreciate art for what it was intended. In the first section, the authors define the seven fundamental purposes of art: remembering, hope, sorrow, rebalancing, self-understanding, growth, and appreciation.
Behind every piece of art is a fundamental human condition being explored by both the artist and the viewer.
Creating art can be the most physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting pursuit one can go through. The artist must evaluate and explore the physical, emotional, and societal representation they want themselves and the viewer to experience. As they create in the many forms that art can take, artists translate the human condition into color, shape, and detail. It’s a truly incredible process that only some have the patience and practice for, and artists deserve the fullest compensation and recognition for their work.
As I wrote before, we’ve had a lot of time to reflect and explore our emotions and experience, and artists are creating work right now in the middle of a global pandemic, economic crisis, and societal restructuring. Graphic designers create the Instagram posts that we share to spread information in a beautiful way. Documentary filmmakers capture the protests and COVID relief efforts. Muralists remember those we have lost to police brutality, detainment centers at the border, and institutionalized racism. Beyond what we see on social media, there are artists who are creating beautiful and powerful works that will define and remember these wild times that we are living in.
Without these incredible and passionate people, we will not be able to look back at this time years in the future and mindfully reflect on where we have come.
As we look to rebuild and restructure our world, we must remember our black, indigenous, latinx, Asian, and every other non-white artist that captured the emotional and societal growth that has happened. We must fill our museums and galleries with their voices and perspectives as a way to grow as both individuals and as a society. Without the diversity and inclusion of artists in their own professional world, we cannot grow ourselves.
It will be a while until we are able to marvel at art in museums again, but when we do, let us spend time with the works of the voices that are shaping our future.