What would you do to help someone who felt anxious about the future? Or who felt a sense of sadness and loneliness? How could you make a long-term relationship more exciting or alleviate your feelings of being a loser? These are the questions posed by noted philosopher Alain de Botton, co-author (with art historian John Armstrong) of the recently released “Art as Therapy” (Phaidon), who is currently curating an online auction of works that he believes have a palliative effect on such conditions for Paddle8, which runs through January 23. Among the offerings on the block are pieces by Chuck Close, Kiki Smith, and Ed Ruscha. In a recent interview, Angela M.H. Schuster spoke with de Botton about the notion of therapeutic art.
Doesn’t the idea of using works for therapeutic reasons fly in the face of the adage “art for art’s sake”?
The idea that one might use art for “instrumental” reasons tends to set off alarm bells at the heart of the cultural elite, who contend that it’s not a pill, that it shouldn’t be asked to perform some specific function, especially something as egocentric as to “cheer you up” or to “make you a more empathetic person.” I couldn’t disagree more. If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls. Artworks are especially good at helping our psyches in a variety of ways: they rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in calm, stretch our sympathies, reignite our senses, and reawaken appreciation. In my estimation, auction houses should be apothecaries for our deeper selves.
That has long been the function of religious art, yes?
Religions have always been clearly on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the West, Christian art had a very clear function: it was meant to direct us towards the good and wean us off vice. A lot of Buddhist sculpture had an equally clear mission: to encourage us to achieve an inner calm by contemplating the serene expression on the Buddha’s face (and especially his smile). We should take something (but not more) from these examples and get a little more direct about what we demand from the art of our times.
So for the questions you pose [stated in the introduction above], what works would you recommend?
If budget were no object and the works were available, I’d advise taking in Sugimoto’s “North Atlantic Ocean” for the first problem, Richard Serra’s “Fernanda Pessoa” for the second, Jan Steen’s “Woman at her Toilet” for the third, and a 15th-century statue of the Buddhist saintly figure, Guanyin, for the fourth.
In your book, you identify seven functions that art should serve. Can you tell us more about them?
These functions include remembering, as we are prone to lose important information about events; hope, because optimism is key to a happy life; sorrow, which helps us manages our suffering; rebalancing our equilibrium; self-understanding; growth, to alleviate fears of things we find new or threatening; and appreciation, as all too often we fail to appreciate that which we have.
Click on the slideshow to see images and descriptions from the online auction “Art as Therapy.”
For more on Alain de Botton and “Art as Therapy,” visit www.artastherapy.com.
