Guest Writer: Anna Hammond (’25)
Artists aren’t born knowing the life they are to live, it is a slow honing of skill through inspiration that strikes here and there. It is a constant push through burnout and finding the beauty in art again and again. Art is the pursuit of beauty. But what about all of the weird abstract art that makes no sense that I with no ability or talent at all can do? I will say it again: Art is the pursuit of beauty. This does not mean that all art needs to be beautiful, in fact if all art was beautiful we would live in a very dangerous world, one that does not reflect on the broken world around us but rather is a world in it of itself. Art’s pursuit of beauty will use ugliness to cause reflection in the viewer. Art’s pursuit of beauty will use simplicity to make an audience see the complexity that surrounds them. Art’s pursuit of beauty will use gross topics so that the emotion of disgust will rise up in the observer and when combined with others that share this feeling, something is done, discussed, changed.
An oil painting titled Guernica created by Pablo Picasso in 1937 speaks to this notion that art craves beauty. Guernica was painted at a horrific time, during the Spanish Civil War. As noted by author Paloma Esteban Leal, “Pablo Picasso’s motivation for painting the scene in this great work was the news of the German aerial bombing of the Basque town, village of Guernica in Northern Spain.” Picasso’s aim was not to reflect the beauty of his surroundings but the lack of it so that people would see the terrors that war brings on communities. Guernica is a plea for peace. The open mouths screaming for an end, crying in grief of the littered limbs that lie scattered below them, the absence of color and the chaos of the entire painting – all of this to shock the audience so that the gruesome effects of war would end. And it is not just Picasso that pushes for this community of humanity together, as author Leo Tolstoy explains, “all art has this characteristic, that is unites people. Every art causes those to whom the artist’s feeling is transmitted to unite a soul with the artist and also with all who receive the same impression.”
Art is not created to exist in its own realm. It is not made to hang on a wall so one after another looks at it in silence, or read in the middle of words, or listened to on the unpopulated moon; art is made for others to delve into, it is created as a gift for the community that surrounds them, big or small. Just as an architect reimagines a space to be filled by people, a jeweler crafts a ring to be worn and passed down, and a script writer comes up with a narrative to affect those that sit in the fuzzy red seats. Art does not serve itself. Artists create art to and for others, even if that other is themselves in that moment. And good art draws humanity to pursue a more beautiful world, a world of unity. “Art arises when someone of the people, having experienced a strong emotion, feels the necessity of transmitting it to others,” says author Susan Magsamen. The connectedness of art and the deep emotions that it brings is not something that is talked about only in artists’ circles. Art is scientifically proven to benefit you as a whole person. As Magsamen explains, “The arts… trigger a release of neurochemicals, hormones, and endorphins that offer you an emotional release…There is a neurochemical exchange that can lead to what Aristotle called catharsis, or a release of an emotion that leaves you feeling more connected to yourself and others afterward.”
When my grandfather died I found that writing was a form of rest for me and I was not alone in that experience. For many writers, writing in itself is a way of catharsis, but what may be unknown is that there is a reason for this. What is absolutely incredible is that specifically in writing poetry, there is a “powerful emotional stimulus [released that is] capable of engaging brain areas of primary reward,” meaning the reward stimulus we get from necessary actions such as eating, drinking, and sleeping is also released when writing poetry (Magsamen, 2023).
Just as writing can heal people emotionally, music can heal one mentally. “At a home in upstate New York, a man with advanced Alzheimer’s disease [recognized] his son for the first time in five years after he [heard] a curated playlist of songs from his past” (Magsamen, 2023). Music not only gives good vibes in a car ride, but restores memory. When “you feel moved by your favorite song… you are literally changed, on a cellular level, by aesthetics” (Magsamen, 2023). According to Magsamen, at Stanford University an acoustic engineer, Utkan Demirci worked alongside a cardiologist Sean Wu, and together they discovered that acoustic waves on a microscale make “heart cells dance into patterns.” As humans we recognize that there is a connection with ourselves and music. Albeit everyone may have opposing tastes in music, there are specific songs that each person will sing or dance to, no sound is left speaking to itself. As noted by Magsamen, “Music therapy improves one’s overall mental state, including negative symptoms of schizophrenics, and improves social functioning because music acts as a medium to help process emotions,” like writing and also drawing. Art across all sectors activates the brain in new beautiful ways that allows the artist and those experiencing it to experience catharsis, newfound joy, and hope.
In a 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine by researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the researchers looked at the effects of 11 different types of physical activity, including reading, writing, doing crossword puzzles, playing cards, playing musical instruments, dancing, walking, cycling, golf, swimming, and tennis. Through 21 years of the intentional study of senior citizens 75 and older it was found that only one of the activities studied—dance—lowered participants’ risk of dementia. According to the researchers, dancing involves both a mental effort and social interaction and this specific stimulation helped reduce the risk of dementia. With other mental diseases such as Alzheimer’s it has been shown that dance and music prevail through this cloud that is developed in the brain such as the man who finally recognized his son again after listening to an oldies playlist.
Another story that went viral on Youtube a few years ago, was the former Spanish ballerina, Marta C. González, dancing to Tchaikovski’s Swan Lake after years of living without persistent memory as Alzheimer’s takes that away. The video begins with her listening to the iconic music in headphones and after some time her upper body begins to move recalling the choreography as she sits in a wheelchair. Study after study shows that dance helps reduce stress, increases levels of the feel-good hormone serotonin, and helps develop new neural connections, especially in regions involved in executive function, long-term memory, and spatial recognition. But as I have been discovering, it is not just dance that does so, all art has a beautiful, positive impact on the human as a whole. Art is not just important its transformative.
(Featured image source: rawpixel.com / Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC)
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