Authors: [[Alain de Botton]] - [[John Armstrong]] Publication date: October 17, 2013 Tags: #book #practical *** - [[#About this book|About this book]] - [[#Art as a tool to support mental health|Art as a tool to support mental health]] - [[#Art as a tool to explore spirituality|Art as a tool to explore spirituality]] - [[#Art as a tool to build better relationships|Art as a tool to build better relationships]] - [[#Art as a learning tool|Art as a learning tool]] - [[#Art as a tool to reframe society|Art as a tool to reframe society]] - [[#Art as a tool to reframe society#Judging art|Judging art]] - [[#Art as a tool to reframe society#Art and capitalism|Art and capitalism]] - [[#Art as a tool to reframe society#How art can improve society|How art can improve society]] - [[#Art as a tool to reframe society#Art and freedom of speech|Art and freedom of speech]] - [[#How to buy art?|How to buy art?]] ## About this book *** This is a practical book. Its goal is to offer the reader a new way to approach art, not for the sake of it but as a tool designed to compensate one's psychological and emotional shortcomings. It is structured by the author as follows: 1. How to use, make, buy, study and display art 2. How can art contribute to nurture our relationships 3. How can art help us reconnecting with nature 4. How can art help us navigating the modern era of capitalism 5. How can art act as a tool for political change ## Art as a tool to support mental health *** **Art is a tool to support the mind** (4-5) Art if often approached as for its own sake, yet it could and should be used as a tool to compensate for one's psychological and emotional shortcomings. **Therapeutic Art** (67) One way to appreciate art is to assess how much a given piece of art is able to help us grow and to support our psychological and emotional defectivenesses. **Art supports equilibrium** (29-30) Art can help us reach our equilibrium by providing us with things that we lack of, wether it is nature, concepts, psychological gaps or reminders for a particular virtue or value. **Art to convey optimism** (12-13) Enjoying beauty and prettiness doesn't make us naive, on the contrary it fuels us with optimism, which can in turn be instrumental to reach our goals. **Art empowers us to face pain** (25-27) Through sublimation, art can embellish and dignify sorrow. It supports us to grow from them and gears us up with the right tools and states of mind to face them. **Art prompts us toward gratitude** (56) Art can break our habits by taking things out of our ordinary and prompting us to approach them in either a brand new and refreshing way, or and ordinary and contemplative fashion. In both cases, it can fill us with a sense of gratitude for little things that are part of our daily lives but often overlooked. **Art as a remembering tool** (8-12) Art can help us remember things, persons and experience by capturing their essence and rendering it with great layers of sensory details. ## Art as a tool to explore spirituality *** **Using our time well** (137 -138) We humans are bad at long-term thinking. Art can help us putting ourselves in perspective and remind us that our existence is finite. Thus, we're better equipped to use our time well. **Existential fears** (142-143) Art can help us to gain perspective on the insignificance of our existence. It can convey a contemplative state of mind that brings peace and not dispair in face of our existential fears and questioning. **Inspiration from nature** (125-127) Art teaches us to value our encounters with nature more than we do, even during simple short walks. Great pieces of art will select and emphasize specific elements of nature that provoked the artist's enthusiasm and could inspire us as well. ## Art as a tool to build better relationships *** **We are complex and loveable creatures** (119-120) Art helps us to rediscover greater values and traits of characters in our loved ones, breaking through layers of routines and reminding us that we all are multidimensional creatures. **Highlighting qualities** (101) Art can highlight qualities and virtues we're looking for in a relationship and help us both contemplating and adopting them. **Loving attitude** (97) Art can showcase a whole cast of attitudes we should adopt when truly loving someone, which can in turn help us reconnect with emotions buried in the day-to-day of a long-term relationship. ## Art as a learning tool *** **Art to discover and express ourselves** (43) Art can help us to discover ourselves. Some work of art will feel as a reflection of one's particular state of mind, identity of character at a given time. These can then be used as self-reflection, or to express the self to other people in complex yet approachable fashion. **Art as a mind-opener** (44-45) Sometimes a particular kind of art will trigger one's defense mechanism. It can be linked to a negative experience, cognitive biases or even trauma. Engaging with this kind of art nevertheless can be the key to overcome those mechanisms and grow from the confrontation. **Learning from envy** (179) Envy tells us there is a critical piece of information to learn from. Assembling all these pieces of information will help us drawing a map of our future and what we want our life to look like on the long-run. ## Art as a tool to reframe society *** ### Judging art **'Good Art'** (60) The concept of 'good art' is a product of society. **What is criticism?** (165) At its root, criticism is the art of unraveling our opinion about something and articulate it with utmost clarity. ### Art and capitalism **How we spend money** (156) The main problem with capitalism lies with us the people. We're the ones deciding to spend money on what fuels an unhealthy system. **Solving capitalism** (174-175) Capitalism is not inherently bad. The key challenge to solve is the balance between profil and positive, meaningful and impactful outcomes. **Towards enlighted capitalism** (168) A better and healthier approach to capitalism would be to aim for profitability, without neglecting the beauty, effectiveness and usefulness of the end product. **Two models of postitive impact** (173) Instead of focusing on earning first, then on giving back, an interesting model would be to slowly build positive impact throughout our lives. ### How art can improve society **Using art to improve society** (192) Artists can conduct a deep analysis of society, find its flaws, their root cause and use art to subtly push their audience into a better direction. **Identities, pride and communities** (200) Art is closely connected to our identities as individuals, countries and communities. However, individual identities are often a few generations late compared to a nation's reality. Art can help reflect what a given country is proud of and reflect its occurrences of change in direction. **Guiding our emotions** (94-95) Guiding our emotions instead of restraining them is a crucial part if we want to build a fruitful society and art from all medium can support us towards this purpose. **Growing a cohesive and healthy nation** (210) To grow a cohesive and healthy nation, its population must align with both a set of values and behaviours they resolve to adopt. Then, these values and behaviours must be reflected in their everyday lives. **Repetition is key** (214) Repetition through frequent exposure in various places and times is key to cement the values art is supposed to convey. It is true for all values, independantly of the medium showcasing them. **Education based on kindness** (162-163) Great educational strategy should be based on kindness and connect with what the learner already knows. Thus, when they'll connect the newly acquired piece of information to their existing knowledge, it will resonate and stickwith us. ### Art and freedom of speech **Information overload** (216) All messages are not worth conveying and especially not worth conveying anywhere. It's especially true for advertising, in today's society ruled by inforation overload. **Art as propaganda** (68) In the past and event in the present, art was commanded by societal entities for propaganda purposes, exploiting the artist's creativity to install dogma in the people's mind. **The Freedom Paradox** (219) Freedom is not the golden standard. Freedom is valuable only when it allows good and positive outcomes, but clearly not when it allows negative behaviours. To ensure that freedom as a value is put to good use, censorship is necessary. Freedom and restriction are in fact paradoxally interlinked. ## How to buy art? *** **Art and gift shops** (76-77) Gift shops are instrumental to bring a little bit of what we experienced at a gallery or museum into our daily lives. Postcards are a great way to become owner of some of it. We should mostly consider what impact a given item will have on our lives and how aligned these items are with the artist's values and ideals. **How to commission useful art** (71) An interesting approach to commission art would be for museums, entities or even individual to ask the artist for specific piece of arts answering our psychological needs, either as individual or society.