The arts give us comfort, healing power
So many sectors of the economy are struggling. Retail and hospitality, tourism and fitness. But what I worry about most are the arts. I’m not alone. Gov. Andrew
Cuomo has made recovery for the arts a huge part of his State of the State proposals.
I know it’s hard to prioritize plays and concerts over restaurants and retail. But there is a good reason why we should. Keeping businesses — large and small — open is good for our economy but keeping the arts alive is good for our soul — our individual souls, and the nation’s soul.
The arts need economic support as the governor made clear as he outlined the employment and economic ricochet. Americans for the Arts reports that each person attending a cultural event in a major metropolitan area eats, sleeps, and shops as well, consequently spending an average additional $350 per day.
But we also need the comfort and civility that come from museums and galleries. We need plays and performances — both revivals and brand new ones — to revive us.
Another reason why the arts must remain viable — and available — is because the arts are a sanctuary for us when other forms of refuge — political or spiritual — fail. Anthony Trollope, the 19th-century novelist and commentator on the human condition, wrote “Amusement and entertainment are as useful and necessary to people in pain as are food and raiment.”
Since March many of us have spent our dinner hour watching the news and the climbing death count. But the images that come to me now are much older. My mind calls up Picasso’s “Guernica ,” the cubist, shattered painting. His depiction of agony feels
My mind calls up Picasso’s “Guernica, ” the cubist, shattered painting. His depiction of agony feels more relevant than any news analysis or statistic. Why that painting now?
more relevant than any news analysis or statistic. Why that painting now? When I went to look it up my emotional memory was confirmed. “Guernica” was painted to protest the bombing of a Spanish town where, for a moment, brute force seemed to triumph.
Another painting I returned to this week is “The Scream” by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. In it, a man on a bridge holds his head and screams into the sky. In 1895 Munch wrote, “I was walking along a path with two friends, the sun was setting, I felt the breath of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood red. I stopped and leaned against a railing, deathly tired. My friends walked on – I stood there trembling with anxiety and felt a great, infinite scream pass through nature.”
That scream is near us now. The exhaustion and the anxiety penetrate children and adults. We feel the collective anxiety as the pandemic continues. We must remember that the grief is for our country and it is terribly individual. Each COVID-19 death is the loss of a husband, wife, lover, son, daughter, father, or mother, and they are multiplied by all those who loved them.
Not even the religious community can provide salve for this much grief. No “10 Tips for Coping,” or advice about stress can refill the spiritual wells depleted this year. Therapy has its place, as do political responses, but now is the time for the concert, the ballet, the play and the poem.
We need art to explain the unexplainable. What politicians cannot legislate, and what journalists cannot explain, works of art can communicate.
Peace of mind is stolen from us by this virus. Emotional processing and intellectual remedies will follow in their own time, but for now a piano concerto or a painting or a play can nourish us.
Art transcends. Art heals. The show must go on.