The arts can “disturb and disrupt” too, so why make them a tool for healing?
Tiffany Jenkins criticises the Scottish Government's recent study that linked participation in culture to good health and high life satisfaction.
Expressionist painter Edvard Munch’s The Scream depicts a desperate anxiety and horror with life that most of us have experienced. It is also one of the most recognised and reproduced paintings in the world, which suggests that people want to encounter this darkness. We do not always feel, or want to feel, happy or content when we experience art. It can cause and be created by pain, anger and outrage.
The impact of art has been debated for centuries, from the fifth century BC to the present day. For Plato, the philosopher writing in Classical Athens, the arts, especially poetry and theatre, had a corrupting influence. In The Republic, he argued that as art imitates physical things, which imitate the Forms (abstract properties or qualities), art is a copy of a copy and leads us away from truth towards illusion. The arts, he also advanced, appeal to the irrational and emotional parts of the person, which is a problem, especially with the impressionable. Thus, to train and protect citizens for an ideal society, the arts should be controlled. Plato proposed banishing the poets and playwrights out of his ideal republic, with music and painting censored.
The assessment of art as having a negative impact has a long tradition, but it is one that is now thoroughly out of fashion. Today, we hear a great deal about the positive impact; the good the arts do. Along these lines, one argument outlines that the arts stimulate the economy, an agenda that has been much criticised, and rightly so. Another example of the positive impact idea, but one that is increasingly dominant and unchallenged, is that the arts make us better. Not better people – that was the view held in the 19th century – but healthier people.
Expressionist painter Edvard Munch’s The Scream depicts a desperate anxiety and horror with life that most of us have experienced. It is also one of the most recognised and reproduced paintings in the world, which suggests that people want to encounter this darkness. We do not always feel, or want to feel, happy or content when we experience art. It can cause and be created by pain, anger and outrage.
The impact of art has been debated for centuries, from the fifth century BC to the present day. For Plato, the philosopher writing in Classical Athens, the arts, especially poetry and theatre, had a corrupting influence. In The Republic, he argued that as art imitates physical things, which imitate the Forms (abstract properties or qualities), art is a copy of a copy and leads us away from truth towards illusion. The arts, he also advanced, appeal to the irrational and emotional parts of the person, which is a problem, especially with the impressionable. Thus, to train and protect citizens for an ideal society, the arts should be controlled. Plato proposed banishing the poets and playwrights out of his ideal republic, with music and painting censored.
The assessment of art as having a negative impact has a long tradition, but it is one that is now thoroughly out of fashion. Today, we hear a great deal about the positive impact; the good the arts do. Along these lines, one argument outlines that the arts stimulate the economy, an agenda that has been much criticised, and rightly so. Another example of the positive impact idea, but one that is increasingly dominant and unchallenged, is that the arts make us better. Not better people – that was the view held in the 19th century – but healthier people.