out from bodies, hands are just fingers. Velazquez painted a picture of a child, the little princess, touchingly sweet and innocent in the middle of a very adult, very wealthy and powerful world. Picasso has reimagined the work in a more innocent way. He has rehabilitated a sense of spontaneity and simplicity that is rather drowned out in the work of his great Spanish predecessor. It is clear that Picasso admires the pronounced rectangles and triangles in Velazquez. In the earlier picture, these are subordinated to realistic depiction: they are the shapes of the room and things in it. Picasso, however, gives the geometrical forms a life of their own. In other words, he is taking a theme he likes and expanding on and developing it. Picasso is not trying to copy Velazquez. He is being himself around it, in the same way a good friendship allows two people to be themselves in each other's presence.
Encounters with art that seem initially offputting - Las Meninas, Sargent's aristocratic portrait, the African mask or Ricci's picture of Saint Bruno - offer us lessons in psychological growth. Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things. Maturity is the possession of coping skills: we can take in our stride things that previously would have knocked us off course. We are less fragile, less easily shocked and hence more capable of engaging with situations as they really are. Along with the Roman playwright Terence, we can say, 1 am human. Nothing human is foreign to me/ The phrase captures the idea of being able to find personal resonance even in areas far from one's own direct experience and culture.
Art that starts by seeming alien to us is valuable because it presents us with ideas and attitudes that are not readily available in our familiar environments, and that we will need in order to accede to a full engagement with our humanity. In an emphatically secular or egalitarian culture, important thoughts get lost. Our usual routines may never awaken the important parts of ourselves; they will remain dormant until prodded, teased and usefully provoked by the world of art. Alien art allows me to discover a religious impulse in myself, or an aristocratic side to my imagination, or a desire for rituals of initiation - and such discovery expands my sense of who 1 am. Not everything we need is at the forefront in every place or era. It is when we find points of connection to the foreign that we are able to grow.
Appreciation
One of our major flaws, and causes of our unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of what is always around. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attractions of elsewhere.
The problem is partly caused by our skill at getting used to things: our mastery of the art of habituation. Habit is the mechanism whereby behaviour becomes automatic across a range of areas of our functioning. It offers us many benefits. Before we've picked up the habit of driving, we need to be acutely conscious of everything that is going on as we sit at the wheel; our senses are highly alert to sounds, lights, movement and to the sheer, alarming implausibility of steering a box of steel at speed through the world. This hyper-awareness can make driving a test of nerves. However, after years of practice, it gradually becomes possible to drive for miles while hardly thinking consciously about changing gears or indicating. Our actions become unconscious, and we can ponder the meaning of life while negotiating a roundabout.
However, habit can just as easily become a cause of misfortune, when it makes us prone to barely register things that, although familiar, deserve careful engagement. Instead of editing out the lesser things, so that we can concentrate on what is crucial (as ideally happens on the road), we end up editing out elements of the world that have much to offer us.
Art is one resource that can lead us back to a more accurate assessment of what is valuable by working against habit and inviting us to recalibrate what we admire or love. Few people pay much attention to the appearance of beer cans. They are amongst the most lowly, utilitarian objects we encounter. However, in I960 the American artist Jasper Johns used the resources of art to encourage us to see them afresh. He cast two examples in bronze, painted the name of their company (Ballantine Ale) on the sides and placed them close together on a small base (35). When we see them in a gallery, or look at them in a photo, our attention is arrested and directed. We pay a great deal more attention than we normally would to their shape and design, recognizing the elegance of the maker's elliptical logo and the attractive proportions of each cylinder. The heavy, costly material they are made of makes us newly aware of their separateness and oddity: we see them as though we had never laid
Paying attention to
eyes on cans before, acknowledging their intriguing identities as a child or a Martian, both free of habit in this area, might naturally do.
Johns is teaching us a lesson: how to look with kinder and more alert eyes at the world about us. This particular instance may be very modest. Learning to appreciate the look of a beer can may in itself make little improvement to our daily lives, but the lesson grows more substantial when we consider its general applicability to the many other objects, situations, moods and people that lie before us in a state of pre-artistic neglect. Our ordinary responses, not just to beer cans but to the sky, our friends, the shapes of rooms, the joys of our children, the buildings we drive past every day and the expressions on the faces of our spouses, are too often flattened and cliched. We may take little note because we rest assured that we have already seen them clearly enough - a prejudice that art proudly contradicts by foregrounding all that we are likely to have missed.
Like Jasper Johns' cans, 1943 (painting,), by the English artist Ben Nicholson, is a testament to the basic pleasures of simple things (36). One can imagine Nicholson absorbed by the task of carefully working on the arrangement - and subtle rearrangement - in search of a particular kind of harmony. There is a kinship here with the pleasures of doing a jigsaw or organizing the household accounts. The work is a product of a spirit that loves small manoeuvres, a spirit that could with ease be translated into the language of domestic tasks or quiet hobbies (stacking a dishwasher, designing a model railway layout). The artwork lifts these moods and moments of happy concentration into the public realm and directs some of the accumulated prestige of art towards them. This is an act of justice and not of condescension, because in the scheme of life these satisfactions, which have received so little acclaim and have not
The pleasure of organizing llnngs.
36. Ben Nicholson. 1943 (paintingi.mi
been much celebrated in the history of philosophy, genuinely need to be taken more seriously. They are not heroic, disturbing or dramatic, but this is their virtue. Given how life generally goes, we need all the reliable, unassuming and inexpensive satisfactions we can get. The work is not arguing that organizing paper is always more important than fighting for one's country, forming good relationships or being a reliable employee. It simply speaks up gracefully in the name of some of our more neglected capacities, and thereby helps us to live more easily with ourselves and others.