Yes, We Are Living in Weird Times, Which is Exactly Why We Should All Become Artists.
We are social beings living through weird, stressful, and isolated times, to say the least. The trending Atlantic piece “Why People Are Acting So Weird” recently responded to the same observation. While I agreed with the author that an increase in unruly behavior and antisocial tendencies emerged due to the isolation of our pandemic years, I also thought that the conversation stopped short Of course, we were acting weird, I thought, that is a normal response, but what can we do to accept and heal? For me, the necessary next step in this conversation is unlikely to some, but at the heart of what I believe: it’s time for us all to become artists now.
The media often writes about the need for resilience as a response to the pandemic, but also often without actual suggestions on how to promote this vital quality with people and communities. Becoming an artist is a dynamic way to promote resilience, even across the political and psychological barriers that divide us.
In “Arts and the Creation of Mind” Elliot Eisner writes that art-making is a “means of exploring our own interior landscape.” Resilience can take root in this interior landscape when we navigate inwardly through the flexible art-making processes. Art-making presents opportunities to organize, design, reflect, and strategize on making sense of ambiguity for personal meaning, a process essential to resilient psycho-social development, both as individuals and across systems.
No end to the wealth of research shows that a broad range of engaging with the arts builds resilience across the lifespan. In 2019 the WHO released a report showing that the arts improve well-being in promoting, preventing, and managing our mental and physical health. NPR reported recently that art classes were a respite for children during the pandemic. The arts improve educational outcomes alongside emotional and social learning in and out of school. The arts allow students to engage with each other in new and meaningful ways. Veterans benefit from art therapy targeted to PTSD. Museums are taking the step of promoting art therapy inside their buildings. Creativity is even a key to healthier aging. The growing field of neuroaesthetics is primed to take these threads further at the intersection of psychology, biology, and human evolution to show that the arts are hardwired in our brains.
One unexpected benefit of the pandemic years so far is it also brought opportunities to promote radically expanded access to art education through our digital and hybrid worlds. Museums and community centers reached new members through digital platforms. Art bots flooded Twitter with a breadth of artists. Art education changed with Tiktok ‘s potential for short and viral videos. Just recently, the mesmerizing AI Dall-E 2 showed how users might be able to interact with AI to make amazingly good graphic art, which could have a tangible impact on understanding image-making and creativity as our AI world develops.
As these pandemic years have shown, resilient people and communities alongside a hybrid way of learning are key to our future. Getting art education into more spaces and especially non-traditional ones can radically change how and why people become artists on and offline. Social media platforms have faced their own struggle of identity and ethics in the pandemic, but now they can be an unexpected arena to promote art through education. This moment has me asking: what would our big tech future look like if art education was more central to these platforms at their core?
My passion for the importance of art in our post-pandemic world is personal first. I spent my pandemic years in the challenging events of getting a divorce and living alone for the first time. Without my own art practice, first alone and then in hybrid digital art communities, I would not have survived.
I understood through that time that the accumulation of trying to be an artist is like trying to speak a language for the first time. It’s also a language only particular to you, so you need lots of experiences and chances with yourself to be exposed. The goal isn’t to arrive with your art at the final destination as an artist — because if you make art you’re an artist — the goal is to sit present in the language of yourself through the process of becoming. And in that process, one can learn to be present and accept the flow of life, to embrace change, even when life is quite weird.
Through these flexible processes of becoming in art-making, we may bolster resilient and thriving individuals and communities in exciting and unexpected ways. The time is now for us to turn to our interior landscapes through analog and digital art so that we may survive even in the hardest and weirdest of times.
