What we call 'glamour' usually lies elsewhere: in the homes of people we don't know, at parties we read about, in the lives of people who have been adept at turning their talents into money and fame. It's in the nature of media-dominated societies that they will, by definition, expose us to a great deal more glamour than most of us have the opportunity to participate in. We are left peering, painfully, through the window at enticements beyond. Commercial images help generate a longing for the higher realms promised by contemporary capitalism; they give us a ringside scat at the holidays, professional triumphs, love affairs, evenings out and birthdays of an elite we are condemned to know far better than they know us.
If images carry a lot of the blame for instilling a sickness in our souls, they can also occasionally be credited for offering us antidotes. It is in the power of art both to disgust us with the apparent tedium and colourlessness of our condition, and to effect intelligent reconciliations with it. Consider Chard in's A Lady Taking Tea (37). The sitters dress might be a bit more elaborate than is normal today, but the painted table, teapot, chair, spoon and cup could all be picked up at a flea market. The room is studiously plain. Yet the picture is glamorous: it makes this ordinary occasion, and the simple furnishings, seductive. It invites the beholder to go home and create their own live version. The glamour is not a false sheen that pretends something lovely is going on when it isn't. Chardin recognises the worth of a modest moment and marshals his genius to bring its qualities to our notice.
It lies in the power of art to honour the elusive but real value of ordinary life. It can teach us to be more just towards ourselves as we endeavour to make the best of our circumstances: a job we do not always love, the imperfections of middle age, our frustrated ambitions and our attempts to stay loyal to irritable but loved spouses. Art can do the opposite of glamourizing the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as were forced to lead it.
A modest moment, appreciated for its true worth.
37. Jean-Bapiisre- Sim^on Chardin, / Lady Taking Tea. 1735
What, then, are the consequences of holding to a therapeutic vision of What art? Principally, the conviction that the main point of engaging with art
j is to help us lead better lives - to access better versions of ourselves.
If art has such a power, it is because it is a tool that can correct or Point compensate for a range of psychological frailties. To summarize some
of Art? of these frailties:
We forget what matters; we can't hold on to important but slippery experiences.
We have a proclivity to lose hope: we are oversensitive to the bad sides of existence. We lose out on legitimate chances of success because we fail to see the reasonableness of keeping going at certain things.
We incline towards feelings of isolation and persecution because we have an unrealistic sense of how much difficulty is normal. We panic too easily, as we misjudge the meaning of our troubles. We are lonely - not that we have no one to talk to, but because those around us can't appreciate our travails with sufficient depth, honesty and patience. This is partly because the ways we show the pain of our choppy relationships, envy or unfulfilled ambitions can easily seem pejorative and insulting. We suffer and we feel that this suffering lacks dignity.
We are unbalanced and lose sight of our best sides. We aren't just one person. We are made up of multiple selves, and we recognize that some of these are better than others. We meet our better selves too often
by chance, and when it is too late; we suffer from a weakness of will
/
in relation to our highest ambitions. It's not that we don't know how to behave, we simply fail to act upon our intermittent best insights because they aren't available to us in sufficiently convincing forms.
We are hard to get to know: we are mysterious to ourselves and therefore no good at explaining who we arc to others, or being liked for reasons we think are appropriate.
We reject many experiences, peoples, places and eras that have something important to offer us because they come in the wrong wrapping and so leave us unable to connect. We are prey to superficial, prejudiced judgements. We think things are 'foreign' far too defensively.
We are desensitized by familiarity and live in a commercially dominated world that highlights glamour. Hence we often end up dissatisfied that life is humdrum; we are gnawed by the worry that life is elsewhere.
It is in relation to these seven psychological frailties that art finds its
purpose and value as a tool, and offers us seven means of assistance:
a corrective or bad memory: Art makes memorable and renewable the fruits of experience. It is a mechanism to keep precious things, and our best insights, in good condition and makes them publicly accessible. Art banks our collective winnings.
a purveyor of hope: Art keeps pleasant and cheering things in view. It knows we despair too easily.
л source of dignified sorrow: Art reminds us of the legitimate place of sorrow in a good life, so that we panic less about our difficulties and recognize them as parts of a noble existence.
a balancing agent: Art encodes with unusual clarity the essence of our good qualities and holds them up before us, in a variety of media, to help rebalance our natures and direct us towards our
best possibilities.
a guide to self-knowledge: Art can help us identify what is central to ourselves, but hard to put into words. Much that is human is
not readily available in language. We can hold up art objects and say, confusedly but importantly, This is me.'
a guide to the extension of experience: Art is an immensely sophisticated accumulation of the experiences of others, presented to us in well-shaped and well-organized forms. It can provide us with some of the most eloquent instances of the voices of other cultures, so that an engagement with artworks stretches our notions of ourselves and our world. At first, much of art seems merely 'other', but we discover that it can contain ideas and attitudes that we can make our own in ways that enrich us. Not everything we need to become better versions of ourselves is already to hand in the vicinity.
a re-sensitization tooclass="underline" Art peels away our shell and saves us from our spoilt, habitual disregard for what is all around us. We recover our sensitivity: we look at the old in new ways. We are prevented from assuming that novelty and glamour are the only solutions.
We grow up with a canon of art: a widely accepted list of the art we What should revere if we want to lay claim to being intelligent, educated
Counts citizens. One is more or less required to regard certain artists as
important. Caravaggio and Rembrandt are the great painters of the as Good seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, Chardin is quite
Art? important, but Goya more so. In the nineteenth century, Manet and
Cezanne deserve special respect: in the twentieth, the key names are Picasso, Bacon and Warhol. Of course, the canon varies from time to time and is nuanced by experience, but we tend to be fairly loyal, perhaps without really noticing, to some approximation of this list. It would take a lot of nerve to depart publicly from it. This leads to a strange paradox: we may well end up unimpressed or cold before works that, in theory, we regard as masterpieces. Or we may dutifully attempt to force the appropriate reaction.
Faced with Caravaggio's depiction of the Biblical Judiths decapitation of the Assyrian general Holofernes, one might feel one ought to like it because it doesn't try to be prim about what it might be like to cut someone's head oft* because the light falling on Judith's dress is particularly vivid and because it shows that women can be violent, thereby counteracting the patronizing notion of the gentle sex (38). Many people enthuse about this artist's work, but in honest moments one might admit to not really liking it.