Somehow, in our culture, we’ve tacitly agreed to accept art as something less, something inessential; a weird thing a freaky few of us do, over in a corner; a sort of quaint paper-swan-making. But it seems to me that art is actually the most high-level thing the human mind can do; that the “brain on art” is at its most capacious and generous and dynamic; that the artistic mode of thought was given to us in order to guide us to higher ground in difficult times, to enable us to get better at empathy and truly complex thinking.
Being involved in art (whether as producer or recipient) reminds us, ritually, that this spacious part of our mind exists, that we are not meant to be (merely) beings in opposition to each other, fighting for limited resources, but are brothers and sisters at heart, capable of knowing one another’s experiences, and feeling genuine sympathy for one another. Art instructs us in how to get into that spacious mindset, and how to abide there.
-George Saunders, February newsletter