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A principal reason I advocate for art and support artists in my work as a psychologist is because art is about quality of life — and that means on personal, communal, and societal levels. Art improves quality of life now.
Think about it: when does art happen? It’s like the old thought experiment, “a tree falls in the forest…” If there’s no one there to hear it, the concussion of the tree hitting the ground produces pressure waves in the air and the ground, but sound per se is an artifact of animal auditory perception (there’s no such thing as sound — pitch, timbre — outside of a brain that’s processing vibrations). Similarly, if there’s a mural on a building, it’s just a wall reflecting different wavelengths of light compared to other walls unless there is someone to experience it, only then do color, shape, and pattern arise. Art happens in our perception of it — in our minds — and therefore requires an experiencer. One consequence of that is that art happens when it is experienced. Art happens now.
This applies if you’re looking at a petroglyph that was scratched on a rock before civilization was dreamt of or at a dance concert where the band is improvising on the spot: your experience of a thing is an indispensable component of art and your experience can only ever be now.
This is how psychotherapy works, too. A description of what happens in session is likely to be pretty boring: one person talks, another person talks, back and forth, maybe there’s some laughing, maybe some crying. (By the way, this is why good psychotherapy makes lousy TV and vice versa.) But the power of psychotherapy for both the patient and the psychologist comes in the exploration, in the moment. We experience meaning, context, identity, relationship, in the same way we experience art: by engaging with it in the now.
A society, a community, an individual with more art in their life is more satisfied, more flexible, more resourceful (explicating that assertion is outside the scope of this post, but I can do so another time). The more art that is being made in a place, the more art objects that are standing about, waiting to be experienced, the better the quality of life of those in that place. A mural of a colorful, abstracted bird goes up on the side of a building; a bust of Frank Zappa lurks among trees in a library square; a busker shouts his heart out while strumming a guitar that maybe has been loved a bit too long; a local museum opens an exhibition of selections from the Dutch masters. All this is now; all this matters because it is now and now is when quality of life happens.
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