Art as Therapy Alain De Botton Pdf Download Torrent
Patronizing the Arts
Who'due south afraid of Alain de Botton? At 43, he's already an elder in the church building of self-help, the master of spinning sugary "secular sermons" out of literature ("How Proust Tin can Alter Your Life"), philosophy ("The Consolations of Philosophy"), architecture ("The Architecture of Happiness"). He has a remarkably guileless face up and a friendly, populist vision of fine art. Why then do I keep checking my pockets? And why the grumbles that he condescends to his subjects and regards his readers, as the British writer Lynn Barber put it, equally "ants"?
De Botton's new book, "Art equally Therapy," written with the historian John Armstrong, begins with grim news. Every mean solar day, honest, upright citizens "go out highly respected museums and exhibitions feeling underwhelmed." It'south a scandal, especially since the authors firmly believe art exists to make people "better versions of themselves." They dream of a twenty-four hour period when art can be prescribed for specific "psychological frailties" (including poor memory and pessimism), when museums tin can exist redesigned as gyms for the psyche, grouping works not by style but by the feelings they describe and the muscles they work. Captions will whisper prompts similar: "Don't expect valuable journeys to exist piece of cake," for Frederic Edwin Church building's painting "The Iceberg."
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"Art every bit Therapy" is handsome and depressing. It lays blank the flaws in de Botton's method, importantly 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 abroad like an errant cobweb. True, perverse, playful reductiveness has always been de Botton'southward shtick — he's just never done it and then desperately. The grant proposal prose saps all the fun from the proceedings. What should come up across equally cheeky sounds unhinged: "The true aspiration of art should be to reduce the demand for it"; "We should revisit the idea of censorship, and potentially consider information technology . . . every bit a sincere attempt to organize the earth for our benefit."
Irritatingly, the authors do take a point: in that location is a hunger to believe fine 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 empathetic). And of class fine art consoles and nourishes and does everything Armstrong and de Botton say it does. The problem is that nosotros don't need them as middlemen, and we certainly don't need paintings puréed downwardly to pablum and spoon-fed to us. But Armstrong and de Botton call back so petty of us, they design museums similar Temple Grandin designed humane slaughterhouses, to minimize our fearfulness and confusion. And in sparing us the horror of feeling "inadequate," they deprive us of a adventure at rapture, to work to possess the work ourselves. (Recall the caption on that painting of the iceberg: "Don't await valuable journeys to exist easy.")
I'grand reminded of the historian Leo Steinberg's reaction to Jasper Johns'south early work, specifically "Drawer," in which a drawer is embedded in a sail. Steinberg'southward essay is an elegant, instructive tantrum, the kind of thing one imagines really entices people to look at pictures. It is modest, frank and very funny on the diverseness of feelings an interesting image tin elicit. Steinberg passes from confusion to contempt to terror ("I am alone with this thing, and it is upwardly to me to evaluate it") to a puzzled sort of pleasure. "It is a kind of self-analysis that a new prototype tin throw you into and for which I am grateful," he writes. "I am left in a state of broken-hearted uncertainty 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."
Compassion; the thought of knowledge every bit a process not a pellet is something that used to matter to de Botton. It's something he has forgotten (and can be forgiven for forgetting; unreliable retentivity being, later all, the first "frailty" mentioned in "Art every bit Therapy"). If de Botton were to consult his Proust once more, he'd meet the painter Elstir, whom he treated tenderly in his breakout book, "How Proust Can Modify Your Life." Elstir's message is this: "We cannot exist taught wisdom, we accept to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no i can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare usa." No one, 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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