It is a commonly held notion that there is nothing we cannot buy to make ourselves feel better. From glow-in-the-dark toilet paper (Glow with the flow!) to canned unicorn meat (Tastes like rainbows and stardust!), our dampened spirits need only look to the Internet to realize that the road to happiness, health, and good fortune can be easily purchased and delivered right to our door.

Many skeptics of modern wellness culture—and I count myself among them—tend to look askance at anything marketable that promises to enhance one’s life in any material, physical, or spiritual way. It’s not that we’re scornful about wellness itself. Instead, we tend to question the reliability and authenticity of ‘purchasable health’, whether in the form of biohacking gadgets (‘Fitbits are only fit for landfill!’ the sceptics cry) or influencer-endorsed self-care products (‘Doja Cat can’t make MAC cruelty-free!’ they exclaim).

Our hearts aren’t two sizes too small. To the contrary, cynics like me celebrate evidence-based wellness-enhancing activities that are low-cost or, better yet, free. Volunteering at community events, engaging in lighthearted exercise (nothing too strenuous or expensive, naturally), and taking long, hot showers (please, no thoughts about water waste) all earn our—sometimes reluctant—approval.

My greatest tonic is learning, and there are innumerable free ways to do this, thanks to the World Wide Web—and public libraries, of course. Wellness-culture doubters like me also often embrace engaging with the arts as a legitimate source of pleasure, healing, and emotional growth. Visiting museums (especially free ones), reading novels, and listening to music are just a few examples of meaningful arts-based activities that support well-being.

All that said, there is a special brand of skeptics—and I counted myself among them—who extend their disdain for wellness culture when it trespasses on the hallowed sphere of art. Or rather, Art. When spelled with a capital A, Art comprises those books, films, plays, statues, paintings, and so on that should be taken seriously. Their aesthetic powerdemands that they be approached with reverence and a steely intellectualism.

Forgetting that the self-styled aesthete par excellence,Oscar Wilde, referenced his position in the gutter, these Art-lovers place themselves squarely in the stars. (For those who don’t venerate Oscar Wilde, as I do, I am referencing a quote from his smash-hit play from 1892, Lady Windermere’s Fan, in which Lord Darlington says, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’. Sound familiar? You might also know it from the British Rock band, The Pretenders, where Chrissie Hynde belted it out in ‘Message of Love’ in 1981.

Such art devotees are strongly guarded against drawing on the arts to ‘feel better’. Art therapy? [Sneer.] Thank you, no. Protesting the happiness-through-the-arts industry, these cynics reject art for wellness’ sake while dousing themselves in art for art’s sake. 

Not inherently a bad thing to do. The Art for Art’s Sake movement, sometimes called Aestheticism, began in 19th-century France, but this self-consciously styled rebellion against the moral stranglehold on art and wider societal structures soon made its way to England. There, those who embraced Aestheticism roundly rejected the moralism that nailed firmly into place such enduring harms as restrictive gender norms, sexual shame and stigma, the moralization of poverty, and the equation of respectability with virtue.

To aesthetes (I still count myself among them, though with numerous rigorous qualifications and provisos), art (Art) is inherently valuable, independent of its subject matter or moral, political, ethical, or social weight. As my acting professor used to quip, You want to send a message? Call Western Union! In other words, don’t lean on art to do your heavy lifting.

So, what are my qualifications and provisos, you might ask? Chief among them is that art is indeed inherently valuable, but this doesn’t mean it can’t be drawn on for insight, learning, and—dare I say it?—healing. In this way, art exists both for its own sake and for wellness’ sake.

How might those who embrace an ‘art as therapy’ approach spend time with Art in its many forms: written, spoken, sculpted, sung, painted, or danced, to name a few? Here, I invite you to bring to mind a great masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic Mona Lisa. 

How might I engage with this painting at the level of human emotion? To look at this masterpiece can be unsettling. The Lady Lisa's eyebrows have disappeared over the centuries (if they were ever there at all), and in such a peaceful setting, her mysteriously shifting smile seems almost sinister. What is she smiling at, and where, and at whom? 

I might print (or sketch) a version of the painting and return Mona Lisa's eyebrows to her, creating a backstory to how they were lost. I might add other attributes to her face to give myself a clearer understanding of who the sitter was and what relationship she had with the painter, and now has with the viewer. Or perhaps I could add some colour that makes the background a little less serene. A little funkier. A little more something-that-speaks-to-me. 

In creating a relationship with the prima donna of the art world—in giving visual form to the thoughts and emotions the painting invokes—I have grown to understand the painting’s power, but also something of myself. The choices I make, the stories I invent, and the questions I ask reveal my own ways of seeing. I have learned something about myself by reflecting on how I respond to something external to myself.

And more than that, the act of doing—of clipping papers, choosing stickers, imagining settings and stories, perceiving new landscapes, of being in relationship with great art—may itself be healing. The value lies not only in what I discover but in the process of discovery. Perhaps by exploring the mysteries of the Mona Lisa—and my response to them—I can come to understand myself a little better. I might emerge from the work feeling braver. Bolder. Ready to face the world.  

Heaven forbid! cry le Club d' Art for Art’s Sake. You’ve missed thepoint! The full benefits of the Mona Lisa can only be experienced by the educated elite. (For the thousands of ‘humble' tourists queued up to view this famous lady, just ignore the aesthetes’ wailing. It might get in the way of your pleasure.)

I know I sound attitudinal, but I am as much in this camp as the other, while eschewing snobbery and elitism. I feel and know about art like I feel and know about wine: I appreciate how a specific terroir shapes each vintage. How a skilled vintner takes pride in balancing vibrant acidity with structured tannins. I understand how to luxuriate in wine’s complex, layered aromas and elegant finish. 

But, I refuse to speak about wine in any of these terms, and I rarely drink it with such seriousness. Instead, my general response to a mouthful of wine is, ‘That was delicious!', sometimes said while the liquid is still running down my gullet, causing a mighty slosh and slush of sound and fury somewhere in the back of my throat and then an inelegant splash of fugitive wine on the countertop or floor (or worse, the host’s white blouse).

This isn’t to say I don’t revere wine, or art. In fact, both have the capacity to move me from the mundane to the sublime. 

What do I mean by the sublime? The sublime is the emotional or spiritual experience of encountering something so vast, powerful, or beautiful that it lifts us beyond the ordinary and fills us with awe, wonder, and sometimes even terror. These feelings would be overwhelming if we physically inhabited the worlds art presents—if we were drowning in Bruegel the Elder's Storm at Sea, for example, or trapped in the uncanny silence and expansive emptiness of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. 

But because we experience them from a position of safety, the terror, desolation, and oppression they evoke become, paradoxically, sources of pleasure.

To consider this further, let’s take Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834 edition). The ‘story’ isn’t important for this exercise. The imagery on its own brings the reader an experience of the sublime. Below are the lines the Ancient Mariner speaks when he meets a spectral woman who wins his soul. Read them out loud, if you can.

The western wave was all a-flame.
The day was well nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face.

Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?

Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman's mate?

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

My physical self doesn’t want to get anywhere close to that wild sea and otherworldly woman. Yet, from the safe space of my reading chair (named Sybil, for those who want to know), I drown myself in the atmosphere the poetry evokes. I experience again and again the delicious terror of the sailor's ghastly visitor, surrounded by a sea of flame. Reading it does me great good.

What do I mean by ‘does me great good’? Imagine that every work of art came with a nutrition label, much like the ones found on food packaging. Instead of listing calories, protein, or fibre, the label would indicate the emotional and spiritual nourishment the work provides, along with the percentage of our recommended daily allowance (RDA) of various experiences. By way of example, here is what a day spent absorbing Coleridge’s haunting, hallucinatory poem might provide:

Awe: 88% RDA
Terror: 28% RDA
Ecstasy: 64% RDA
Transcendence: 52% RDA
Melancholy: 21% RDA
Mystery: 76% RDA

These are nutritional benefits I can digest. If art stuns me with its greatness, beauty and power; if it lifts me beyond my daily concerns; if it fills me with exhilaration or, conversely, a reflective sadness; or if it leaves me with a sense of itself being beyond comprehension, it has done some great things. Might I even say (ahem), it has contributed to my wellness?

And this is the point I have been aiming to make all along, and the one I want to invite us all to ponder: art, even when appreciated for its inherent value, has a healing power.

I offer a second invitation: Please consider joining one or both of Art & Humanity's September events. The first, on Sept. 13, is a workshop entitled Broken is Beautiful. This event is for those in the ‘Mona Lisa for Wellness’ camp. The second, on Sept. 27, is a lecture—The Poetics of Failure. This lively talk is aimed at those in the ‘art for art's sake’ camp (but be warned: it may still have a healing power). Information about each event and the links to register are at the top of this newsletter, but you can also click on the hot pink text in this paragraph.

I close this reflection not with the roaring sublime of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but rather with the silent, still sublime of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which describes the speaker's experience while hiking through the Alps:

… when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

See you in September. In the meantime, seek out some art, for wellness' sake!