what is the role of art in society essay

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What is the artist’s role in society, 3 reasons why ai isn't an arti...

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Artists, the architects of emotion and vision, stand at the forefront of societal evolution. Their role transcends the aesthetic, weaving an intricate narrative that intertwines with culture, activism, and empathy. In a world navigating the complexities of existence, artists emerge as the custodians of creativity, shaping the very essence of our shared humanity.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Through the annals of time, artists have been the heralds of their epochs. From the majestic strokes of Renaissance masters to the avant-garde expressions of contemporary creators, the artist’s journey mirrors the tides of societal change and the revolutions of culture. They encapsulate history within their creations, etching the soul of each era into the canvas of time.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Art, a poignant mirror reflecting society’s collective consciousness, speaks in diverse languages. Whether manifested in brushstrokes on canvas or woven into the lyrics of a song, artists capture the nuanced essence of their time. Their creations serve as a resonant commentary, inviting audiences to engage with the pulse of the present.

CULTURAL IMPACT

Art’s influence on culture is transformative, shaping identities and challenging established norms. Artists, as cultural architects, contribute to a perpetual narrative, fostering a shared experience that transcends borders. The tapestry they weave becomes an integral part of our collective history, evolving with each stroke of creative expression.

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ART AS ACTIVISM

In an era marked by social and political upheaval, artists assume the mantle of change catalysts. Through the powerful mediums of visual storytelling, music, and performance, they transcend mere artistic expression. Instead, they become advocates, sparking crucial conversations, and challenging the stagnancy of the status quo, infusing art with a sense of purpose.

CHALLENGES FACED BY ARTISTS

Within the realm of artistic pursuit lie formidable challenges. Artists grapple with societal expectations, navigating the labyrinth of commercial pressures, and wrestling with the perpetual struggle for recognition. These hurdles, though daunting, become the crucible in which authenticity is forged, defining the artist’s unique journey.

EVOLVING ROLES

As society undergoes metamorphosis, so does the artist’s role. No longer mere observers, artists have become active participants in shaping conversations. They wield their creativity as a transformative force, influencing societal norms in real-time and contributing to the dynamic evolution of cultural landscapes.

ART AND EMPATHY

At the heart of art lies an extraordinary power—the ability to foster empathy. Artists, through their creations, forge connections that transcend boundaries. By inviting audiences to step into the shoes of others, they enable a profound understanding of diverse perspectives, enriching the human experience.

THE ARTIST’S RESPONSIBILITY

The delicate dance between creativity and social responsibility defines the artist’s ethical compass. They grapple with the profound implications of their work, navigating the fine line between personal expression and the potential impact on a broader audience. In this delicate balance, the artist shoulders a responsibility to inspire, challenge, and provoke thoughtful reflection.

ART IN EDUCATION

Recognizing the transformative potential of creativity, the integration of art into education becomes imperative. Fostering the next generation of artists and nurturing creative thinking contributes to a society that is not only culturally enriched but also innovative and adaptive.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

Beyond its cultural contributions, the arts wield tangible economic influence. Artists contribute significantly to the economy through exhibitions, performances, and the creation of intellectual property. This underscores the intrinsic value of their work, both as a cultural force and an economic driver.

DIVERSITY IN ART

The call for diversity in the art world is a call for richness and inclusivity. Embracing artists from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and cultures enhances the tapestry of artistic expression. This inclusivity fosters a more representative and vibrant artistic community, reflecting the true diversity of the human experience.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE ARTS

In the digital age, technology becomes an ally in artistic expression. From digital art that pushes the boundaries of creativity to virtual performances that transcend physical limitations, technology opens new vistas. It expands the reach and accessibility of art, democratizing creative expression on a global scale.

ART’S HEALING POWER

Beyond aesthetics, art possesses a therapeutic quality. In times of hardship, creative expression becomes a poignant tool for healing. Whether through painting, music, or other mediums, individuals find solace, navigating complex emotions and discovering catharsis through their artistic endeavors.

In conclusion, the artist’s role in society is a kaleidoscope of historical reflection, social commentary, cultural influence, activism, and a profound responsibility to foster empathy. As we celebrate the diversity of artistic expression, we recognize the pivotal role artists play in shaping our collective narrative, enriching our understanding of the human experience.

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Art, Its Functions and Purposes Essay (Critical Writing)

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The concept of art is defined as a high-level skill in any field of creativity. Previously, it was believed that art is an activity that satisfies a person’s spiritual craving for something beautiful. The evolution of the norms of society and aesthetics and activities aimed at creating aesthetic objects in modern times are also called art (Frank 20). Aesthetics is philosophical teaching about the essence and forms of beauty in artistic creativity, nature, life, and art as a particular form of social consciousness. Any art has its own goals and functions, which carry a specific message to society.

The most common function of art is communication, which is aimed at ensuring that a person receives this or that information. Also, the purpose of art is to manage emotions, so its function is to help with relaxation or fun. Sometimes a protest is expressed through art, but art cannot be used directly as a political goal; it can only criticize any elements of political activity. Works of art are sometimes used for propaganda purposes to gradually change the tastes and moods of the public. Calligraphy is the art of beautiful writing, reflecting the integrity of individual letters and the entire text, harmony, form, and rhythm, which transmit written information (Frank 24). There are still many functions and purposes of art, each of which is significant for the spiritual development of people.

One of the most attractive and widespread types of art is fine art. I was attracted by the picture depicted by Claude Lorrain called Ascanius Shooting the Stage of Silvia . The sky in the picture is covered with thunderclouds, the trees are bent by the wind blowing from the left, and the exquisite temple of the Corinthian order has long been destroyed. The artist depicted the incredible picturesqueness and liveliness of nature. Picturesque is a specific property of the arts expressed in the dynamic interaction of forms, light, shadow, and lines, in which there is a vivid impression of general mobility, variability, and diversity of aspects. Looking at this picture, one can imagine the presence in the depicted place and see firsthand all the beauty of this place. This painting has several functions, for example, aesthetic; that is, it forms an aesthetic taste. In addition, it is cognitive since data about the event is transmitted through it.

Frank, Patrick. Prebles Artforms. Pearson, 2019.

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The Value of Art Why should we care about art?

One of the first questions raised when talking about art is simple—why should we care? Art in the contemporary era is easy to dismiss as a selfish pastime for people who have too much time on their hands. Creating art doesn't cure disease, build roads, or feed the poor. So to understand the value of art, let’s look at how art has been valued through history and consider how it is valuable today.

The value of creating

At its most basic level, the act of creating is rewarding in itself. Children draw for the joy of it before they can speak, and creating pictures, sculptures and writing is both a valuable means of communicating ideas and simply fun. Creating is instinctive in humans, for the pleasure of exercising creativity. While applied creativity is valueable in a work context, free-form creativity leads to new ideas.

Material value

Through the ages, art has often been created from valuable materials. Gold , ivory and gemstones adorn medieval crowns , and even the paints used by renaissance artists were made from rare materials like lapis lazuli , ground into pigment. These objects have creative value for their beauty and craftsmanship, but they are also intrinsically valuable because of the materials they contain.

Historical value

Artwork is a record of cultural history. Many ancient cultures are entirely lost to time except for the artworks they created, a legacy that helps us understand our human past. Even recent work can help us understand the lives and times of its creators, like the artwork of African-American artists during the Harlem Renaissance . Artwork is inextricably tied to the time and cultural context it was created in, a relationship called zeitgeist , making art a window into history.

Religious value

For religions around the world, artwork is often used to illustrate their beliefs. Depicting gods and goddesses, from Shiva to the Madonna , make the concepts of faith real to the faithful. Artwork has been believed to contain the spirits of gods or ancestors, or may be used to imbue architecture with an aura of awe and worship like the Badshahi Mosque .

Patriotic value

Art has long been a source of national pride, both as an example of the skill and dedication of a country’s artisans and as expressions of national accomplishments and history, like the Arc de Triomphe , a heroic monument honoring the soldiers who died in the Napoleonic Wars. The patriotic value of art slides into propaganda as well, used to sway the populace towards a political agenda.

Symbolic value

Art is uniquely suited to communicating ideas. Whether it’s writing or painting or sculpture, artwork can distill complex concepts into symbols that can be understood, even sometimes across language barriers and cultures. When art achieves symbolic value it can become a rallying point for a movement, like J. Howard Miller’s 1942 illustration of Rosie the Riveter, which has become an icon of feminism and women’s economic impact across the western world.

Societal value

And here’s where the rubber meets the road: when we look at our world today, we see a seemingly insurmountable wave of fear, bigotry, and hatred expressed by groups of people against anyone who is different from them. While issues of racial and gender bias, homophobia and religious intolerance run deep, and have many complex sources, much of the problem lies with a lack of empathy. When you look at another person and don't see them as human, that’s the beginning of fear, violence and war. Art is communication. And in the contemporary world, it’s often a deeply personal communication. When you create art, you share your worldview, your history, your culture and yourself with the world. Art is a window, however small, into the human struggles and stories of all people. So go see art, find art from other cultures, other religions, other orientations and perspectives. If we learn about each other, maybe we can finally see that we're all in this together. Art is a uniquely human expression of creativity. It helps us understand our past, people who are different from us, and ultimately, ourselves.

Reed Enger, "The Value of Art, Why should we care about art?," in Obelisk Art History , Published June 24, 2017; last modified November 08, 2022, http://www.arthistoryproject.com/essays/the-value-of-art/.

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The Power of Art in Society

The essence of art, art in the society, art and cultural heritage, contemporary problems in arts.

Art can be considered as one of the forms of public consciousness. At the heart of art, lays a creative reflection of reality. Art cognizes and evaluates the world, forms a spiritual shape of people, their feelings and thoughts, their outlook, and awakens their creative abilities. In its essence art is national. The informative role of art makes it close to science, where the artist, as well as the scientist, aspires to make sense of life phenomena, to see in the casual and transient the most typical and characteristic, as well as the pattern in the development of reality.

The deep knowledge of reality, in the long run, is connected with the aspiration to transform it and improve it. The person seizes forces of nature, learns laws of development of society to change the world in compliance with the requirements and the purposes put by the community and the society. Unlike science, art expresses truth, not in abstract notions, but concrete images full of life. The typical in life is embodied in works of art, in unique individually-characteristic forms. In that regard, it can be said that art as an influencing factor plays a major role in society and the life of people.

Accordingly, the art and heritage industry itself had taken different shapes and directions influenced by the consumer nature of the society. In that sense, this paper analyzes art as a power in society, outlining its role and functions, and analyzing the recent issues in art industries.

The aesthetic relationship with reality, contained in all the forms of human activities, could not be ignored as a subject of special reproduction. Such special kind of human activities, in which the aesthetic embodied in the art becomes the content, the method, and the goal is art. In that regard, as an evaluation of the aesthetic effect, art is a process of value finding, rather than a product. (Dague-Barr, 2009)

Tracing the development of theories regarding what represents a work of art, linking art to aesthetics, it can be said that being a work of art is not a physical characteristic, but rather a perception, a perception that previously was considered to be of people belonging to the art world. (Carey, 2006)

In that regard, it can be said that art as a phenomenon is a notion intrinsic to modern society. Art, being born in primeval society, acquired its main characteristics in antiquity, and at the same time, it was not cognized as a special kind of activity. For a certain period, certain activities were considered as arts such as the skills to build houses, navigation skills, good governance, poetry, philosophy, rhetoric, etc. The process of isolating the aesthetic activity, i.e. art in its current perception, began in particular handicrafts, and after that, it was transferred into the sphere of spiritual activity.

Works of art are after-images or replicas of empirical life, since they proffer to the latter what in the outside world is being denied them. In the process, they slough off a repressive, external empirical mode of experiencing the world. Whereas the line separating art from real life should not be fudged, least of all by glorifying the artist, it must be kept in mind that works of art are alive, have a life sui generis. (Adorno et al., 2004)

Art of each epoch is inseparably linked with national culture and historical conditions, with class struggle, and with the level of the spiritual life of the society. Living in a class society, the artist, naturally, acts as the representative of a certain social class. The reflection of the real world, the selection of those or other phenomena of the reality for art reproduction is defined by its social views and is made according to the point of view of certain class ideals and aspirations. In class society, the influence of reactionary ideas leaves traces of limitedness on the creativity of artists.

The artists’ expressions of original interests of classes were seen as expanding artists’ creative outlook and the ability for an aesthetic embodiment in images of art of the advanced aspirations of society as a whole. The art history represents a complex, inconsistent picture of the development of various schools, movements, styles, and currents which are in interaction and struggle.

In their creativity, artists proceed not only from direct impressions, supervision, and observation, but also from the experience which has been accumulated by art through all the history of mankind, from traditions of national movements, leaning on them, and opposing them with the new understanding of the real phenomena.

The progress of art is more strongly and more brightly shown in humanistic and realistic tendencies, along with the gains of each epoch. Realism is an artistic method that is the most corresponding to the informative nature of art. However, the truthful reflection of reality cannot be minimized to copying reality. Realism characterizes aspiration to embody into brightly individual images the typical and the natural in life. The absence of harmonious unity of generalization and the artistic image individualization results in either the sketchiness, which deprives the work of art of persuasiveness, or the depiction of the casual, and small aspects of the reality.

Realism is the art that can be considered as a historical notion. It obtains various contents and forms depending on certain historical conditions of the given epoch, passing several qualitatively unique steps of its development. These steps are defined by changes of the represented subject – new social relations, a new way of life, as well as an embodiment of a new level of social consciousness with the distinction of life representation’s nature.

At early steps of social development, a truthful reflection of an art life is formed spontaneously and mostly dressed in fantastic mythological forms (art of the ancient world and the Middle Ages). Conscious tendency to the cognition of the world, its laws, and realism’s composition as the certain method in art, can be related to the Renaissance epoch when art, as well as science, being released from the captivity of the church’s scholasticism, seizes a truthful display of people’s image, their world outlook, and social relations.

In that regard, it can be considered that the art’s purpose is to reveal in the phenomena of the surrounding life their original essence, visually showing in impressive imagery the most important for the person and a society. One of the main artistic touches can be considered the generalization of an image, it’s standardizing. It allows showing brightly the beautiful in life and uncovers the ugly and the evil. Criticizing the ugly aspects of life, art urges to hate them passionately and to struggle against them. Embodying an ideal of beauty, art inspires deeds for the struggle for the sake of the bright, humane, and good. A major moment of an aesthetic evaluation of the reality is the negative and hostile relation of the artist to all reactionary as ugly, and the evaluation of all progressive as fine.

Art and culture always went to the forefront of society. They laid new paths in social consciousness, created new values, and opened new horizons. When the culture carries out its innovative and educational mission, it becomes a heritage, an experience, and historical memory of the people, and another brick in the building of national identity. In that regard, as art and culture have leading roles in society, they also became a major concern, in terms of their preservation, which can be traced back to France in 1794, where an idea of destroying all Latin inscriptions on monuments came out.

Henry Gregoire, a member of the revolutionary government responded by urging,

a focus on the creator of the art rather than on the patron, to bring the individual to the forefront and to present works of art as examples of the free spirit-genius and talent realized – triumphant over political repression, error and superstition… Because the Pyramids of Egypt had been built by tyranny and for tyranny, ought these monuments of antiquity to be demolished? (Hoffman, 2006)

At earlier times it can be said that art was financed by amateurs. Both rich patrons of art, and the respectable public paid for what was pleasant to them. As a rule, people of creative professions were not rich, if they were not born rich. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the situation began to change, and to a considerable degree, this was related to the accumulation of capital as a result of the industrial revolution, the spreading of education, the development of science, etc.

One after another, museums, theatres and concert halls were opened, which were created and supported by the government or patrons of art, whose numbers have grown, along with the occurrence of an army of professional critics. In the 20th century there were already much more writers, artists, and actors, who could be quite good, and at times very provide themselves. Society began to consider them with more respect, and it could be said that parents were no longer concerned about the fate of the children who decided to be artists.

However, the capitalist model, which purpose was focused on profit and its augmentation, began to change the relation to art gradually. Amateur patrons of art began to be superseded by businessmen and money was invested in what could bring profit. The decisive factor was not the talent of the artist, not the artistic taste of the patron or the public, but the promotion of what was invested in, to receive fast profits. Art and culture became the victims of the process of industrialization which by the end of the 20th century has grasped such spheres which cannot and should not serve profit earning.

Results could be predicted, where the prices increased, the quality was lowered, and the access was limited. Thus, it was the turn of the art to be affected. Today money is invested in arts as in real estate or stock. Especially subjected to market pressure was the fine arts sector, as it is easier to involve market mechanisms when selling. Art became consumer goods and thus should comply with the general mechanism of consumer society actions.

The term art industry might not have become familiar yet, but the techniques of organizational management were spread to it. For is money spent on today? For very rich people it is a diversification of assets portfolio. Those who are of modest means pay for visiting exhibitions, and the ambitious try to be a part of prestigious gatherings.

The occurrence of investors and venture capitalists led to the cultivation of two types of consumers, the elite and the mass consumer. For the latter, who did not go through informational treatment and because of that could not appreciate a certain promoted product, other consumer goods are created which are not demanding intellectual preparation, as elite art, rather than factor related to the psychology of the crowd and appealing not as much to emotions, as to instincts.

An example of such contemporary issues in arts can be seen in the article “Sold!” by Carl Swanson. Published in the October issue of New York Magazine in 2007, the article discussed the sensational resignation of Lisa Dennison from the position of the director of Guggenheim. In her new position, she was engaged in the business development of the auction Sotheby’s. Dennison now helps to replenish the collection of those who have accumulated large sums of money, mostly in Asia and Russia.

Dennison’s new boss Tobias Meyer compares the interests of today’s nouveau riche to the art “icons” of the 20th century, gathered in America, to the robber barons’ fascination with European paintings, and as he stated, “As the Americans were buying Gainsborough’s in 1910, the New Economy is buying portions of bacon and Rothko’s in 2010,”(Swanson, 2007)

Dennison revealed the reason for leaving, stating that museums have ceased to be competitive in the conditions of today’s market, which made her work too difficult, especially after the new CEO of the museum changed its mission, emphasizing the creation and the globalization of the brand of Guggenheim, as an analogy to such brands as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. It can be seen that Dennison attempted to convince her and others that her work in Sotheby’s differs little from her former job. It can be understood though, that if the former job served higher goals and helped to keep self-respect, in the new role she is deprived of it.

Today at auctions the auctions people applaud not for the artist, but for the buyer who spent a fantastic sum. On the crest of the speculation, the prices are raised for the works of known artists. In such a way, Klimt’s portrait was sold about three years ago for a record sum of $135 million, which in no small measure was related to the international scandal connected with its return by the Austrian government to its owners heiress. (VOGEL, 2006)

In that regard, the recent concerns of art and heritage can be seen to be associated mainly with the legal aspects of art preservation. According to such protection, it can be seen that art is protected as it is related to the national and cultural identity of a particular nation. Thus, art can be considered as a reflection of the cultural heritage and preserving works of arts, nations are preserving their cultural heritage. Through works of art, it can be seen what made a particular epoch the way it was, where the history can be written according to the artistic works of different historical periods.

It can be concluded that art is an inseparable sector of the world’s culture which was and still influencing the course of social consciousness. In that regard, it should be outlined that art is also influenced by the changes in social and economic models, turning art into an industry. It should be mentioned that this industry is a profitable one, but the question that should be asked, whether the power of art can sufficiently resist the economic influence of the market, remaining neutral and free of bias. Whether the cultural value of the works of art remains free of such marketing terms as “promotion” and “hype”. The answer to such a question is not easy, but it can be predicted that it depends totally on the people. As stated earlier in the paper, specific work can be considered a work of art if it was perceived that way by people with expertise in art, while the more modern definition states that “a work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art.” (Carey, 2006) Thus, it can be said that the answer to the aforementioned questions can lie in the characteristics of the majority that fall into the category of “anyone” in the last definition of a work of art.

ADORNO, T. W., ADORNO, G., TIEDEMANN, R. & HULLOT-KENTOR, R. (2004) Aesthetic theory, London ; New York, Continuum.

CAREY, J. (2006) What good are the arts?, Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press.

DAGUE-BARR, D. (2009) The Power of Art In Society. Modesto Junior College. Web.

HOFFMAN, B. T. (2006) Art and cultural heritage : law, policy, and practice, Cambridge ; New York, Cambridge University Press.

HOPKINS, D. (2000) After modern art : 1945-2000, Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press.

SWANSON, C. (2007) Sold! , New York Magazine. Web.

VOGEL, C. (2006) Lauder Pays $135 Million, a Record, for a Klimt Portrait. New York Times. Web.

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Why Is Art Important? – The Value of Creative Expression

The importance of art is an important topic and has been debated for many years. Some might think art is not as important as other disciplines like science or technology. Some might ask what art is able to offer the world in terms of evolution in culture and society, or perhaps how can art change us and the world. This article aims to explore these weighty questions and more. So, why is art important to our culture? Let us take a look.

Table of Contents

• 1.1 The Definition of Art
• 1.2 The Types and Genres of Art
• 2.1 Art Is a Universal Language
• 2.2 Art Allows for Self-Expression
• 2.3 Art Keeps Track of History and Culture
• 2.4 Art Assists in Education and Human Development
• 2.5 Art Adds Beauty for Art’s Sake
• 2.6 Art Is Socially and Financially Rewarding
• 2.7 Art Is a Powerful (Political) Tool
• 3 Art Will Always Be There
• 4.1 What Is the Importance of Arts?
• 4.2 Why Is Art Important to Culture?
• 4.3 What Are the Different Types of Art?
• 4.4 What Is the Definition of Art?

What Is Art?

There is no logical answer when we ponder the importance of arts. It is, instead, molded by centuries upon centuries of creation and philosophical ideas and concepts. These not only shaped and informed the way people did things, but they inspired people to do things and live certain ways.

We could even go so far as to say the importance of art is borne from the very act of making art. In other words, it is formulated from abstract ideas, which then turn into the action of creating something (designated as “art”, although this is also a contested topic). This then evokes an impetus or movement within the human individual.

This impetus or movement can be anything from stirred up emotions, crying, feeling inspired, education, the sheer pleasure of aesthetics, or the simple convenience of functional household items – as we said earlier, the importance of art does not have a logical answer.

Before we go deeper into this question and concept, we need some context. Below, we look at some definitions of art to help shape our understanding of art and what it is for us as humans, thus allowing us to better understand its importance.

The Definition of Art

Simply put, the definition of the word “art” originates from the Latin ars or artem , which means “skill”, “craft”, “work of art”, among other similar descriptions. According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, the word has various meanings; art may be a “skill acquired by experience, study, or observation”, a “branch of learning”, “an occupation requiring knowledge or skill”, or “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects”.

We might also tend to think of art in terms of the latter definition provided above, “the conscious use of skill” in the “production of aesthetic objects”. However, does art only serve aesthetic purposes? That will also depend on what art means to us personally, and not how it is collectively defined. If a painting done with great skill is considered to be art, would a piece of furniture that is also made with great skill receive the same label as being art?

Thus, art is defined by our very own perceptions.

Art has also been molded by different definitions throughout history. When we look at it during the Classical or Renaissance periods , it was very much defined by a set of rules, especially through the various art academies in the major European regions like Italy (Academy and Company for the Arts of Drawing in Florence), France (French Academy of Fine Arts), and England (Royal Academy of Arts in London).

In other words, art had an academic component to it so as to distinguish artists from craftsmen.

The defining factor has always been between art for art’s sake , art for aesthetic purposes, and art that serves a purpose or a function, which is also referred to as “utilitarianism”. It was during the Classical and Renaissance periods that art was defined according to these various predetermined rules, but that leaves us with the question of whether these so-called rules are able to illustrate the deeper meaning of what art is?

If we move forward in time to the 20 th  century and the more modern periods of art history, we find ourselves amidst a whole new art world. People have changed considerably between now and the Renaissance era, but we can count on art to be like a trusted friend, reflecting and expressing what is inherent in the cultures and people of the time.

During the 20 th  century, art was not confined to rules like perspective, symmetry, religious subject matter, or only certain types of media like oil paints . Art was freed, so to say, and we see the definition of it changing (literally) in front of our very own eyes over a variety of canvases and objects. Art movements like Cubism , Fauvism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, among others, facilitated this newfound freedom in art.

Artists no longer subscribed to a set of rules and created art from a more subjective vantage point.

Additionally, more resources became available beyond only paint, and artists were able to explore new methods and techniques previously not available. This undoubtedly changed the preconceived notions of what art was. Art became commercialized, aestheticized, and devoid of the traditional Classical meaning from before. We can see this in other art movements like Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, among others.

The Types and Genres of Art

There are also different types and genres of art, and all have had their own evolution in terms of being classified as art. These are the fine arts, consisting of painting, drawing, sculpting, and printmaking; applied arts like architecture; as well as different forms of design such as interior, graphic, and fashion design, which give day-to-day objects aesthetic value.

Other types of art include more decorative or ornamental pieces like ceramics, pottery, jewelry, mosaics, metalwork, woodwork, and fabrics like textiles. Performance arts involve theater and drama, music, and other forms of movement-based modalities like dancing, for example. Lastly, Plastic arts include works made with different materials that are pliable and able to be formed into the subject matter, thus becoming a more hands-on approach with three-dimensional interaction.

Top Reasons for the Importance of Art

Now that we have a reasonable understanding of what art is, and a definition that is ironically undefinable due to the ever-evolving and fluid nature of art, we can look at how the art that we have come to understand is important to culture and society. Below, we will outline some of the top reasons for the importance of art.

Art Is a Universal Language

Art does not need to explain in words how someone feels – it only shows. Almost anyone can create something that conveys a message on a personal or public level, whether it is political, social, cultural, historical, religious, or completely void of any message or purpose. Art becomes a universal language for all of us to tell our stories; it is the ultimate storyteller.

We can tell our stories through paintings, songs, poetry, and many other modalities.

Art connects us with others too. Whenever we view a specific artwork, which was painted by a person with a particular idea in mind, the viewer will feel or think a certain way, which is informed by the artwork (and artist’s) message. As a result, art becomes a universal language used to speak, paint, perform, or build that goes beyond different cultures, religions, ethnicities, or languages. It touches the deepest aspects of being human, which is something we all share.

Art Allows for Self-Expression

Touching on the above point, art touches the deepest aspects of being human and allows us to express these deeper aspects when words fail us. Art becomes like a best friend, giving us the freedom and space to be creative and explore our talents, gifts, and abilities. It can also help us when we need to express difficult emotions and feelings or when we need mental clarity – it gives us an outlet.

Art is widely utilized as a therapeutic tool for many people and is an important vehicle to maintain mental and emotional health. Art also allows us to create something new that will add value to the lives of others. Consistently expressing ourselves through a chosen art modality will also enable us to become more proficient and disciplined in our skills.

Art Keeps Track of History and Culture

We might wonder, why is art important to culture? As a universal language and an expression of our deepest human nature, art has always been the go-to to keep track of everyday events, almost like a visual diary. From the geometric motifs and animals found in early prehistoric cave paintings to portrait paintings from the Renaissance, every artwork is a small window into the ways of life of people from various periods in history. Art connects us with our ancestors and lineage.

When we find different artifacts from all over the world, we are shown how different cultures lived thousands of years ago. We can keep track of our current cultural trends and learn from past societal challenges. We can draw inspiration from past art and artifacts and in turn, create new forms of art.

Art is both timeless and a testament to the different times in our history.

Art Assists in Education and Human Development

Art helps with human development in terms of learning and understanding difficult concepts, as it accesses different parts of the human brain. It allows people to problem-solve as well as make more complex concepts easier to understand by providing a visual format instead of just words or numbers. Other areas that art assists learners in (range from children to adults) are the development of motor skills, critical thinking, creativity, social skills, as well as the ability to think from different perspectives.

Art subjects will also help students improve on other subjects like maths or science. Various research states the positive effects art has on students in public schools – it increases discipline and attendance and decreases the level of unruly behavior.

According to resources and questions asked to students about how art benefits them, they reported that they look forward to their art lesson more than all their other lessons during their school day. Additionally, others dislike the structured format of their school days, and art allows for more creativity and expression away from all the rules. It makes students feel free to do and be themselves.

Art Adds Beauty for Art’s Sake

Art is versatile. Not only can it help us in terms of more complex emotional and mental challenges and enhance our well-being, but it can also simply add beauty to our lives. It can be used in numerous ways to make spaces and areas visually appealing.

When we look at something beautiful, we immediately feel better. A piece of art in a room or office can either create a sense of calm and peace or a sense of movement and dynamism.

Art can lift a space either through a painting on a wall, a piece of colorful furniture, a sculpture, an ornamental object, or even the whole building itself, as we see from so many examples in the world of architecture. Sometimes, art can be just for art’s sake.

Art Is Socially and Financially Rewarding

Art can be socially and financially rewarding in so many ways. It can become a profession where artists of varying modalities can earn an income doing what they love. In turn, it becomes part of the economy. If artists sell their works, whether in an art gallery, a park, or online, this will attract more people to their location. Thus, it could even become a beacon for improved tourism to a city or country.

The best examples are cities in Europe where there are numerous art galleries and architectural landmarks celebrating artists from different periods in art history, from Gothic cathedrals like the Notre Dame in Paris to the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Art can also encourage people to do exercise by hiking up mountains to visit pre-historic rock art caves.

Art Is a Powerful (Political) Tool

Knowing that art is so versatile, that it can be our best friend and teacher, makes it a very powerful tool. The history of humankind gives us thousands of examples that show how art has been used in the hands of people who mean well and people who do not mean well.

Therefore, understanding the role of art in our lives as a powerful tool gives us a strong indication of its importance.

Art is also used as a political medium. Examples include memorials to celebrate significant changemakers in our history, and conveying powerful messages to society in the form of posters, banners, murals, and even graffiti. It has been used throughout history by those who have rebelled as well as those who created propaganda to show the world their intentions, as extreme as wanting to take over the world or disrupt existing regimes.

The Futurist art movement is an example of art combined with a group of men who sought to change the way of the future, informed by significant changes in society like the industrial revolution. It also became a mode of expression of the political stances of its members.

Other movements like Constructivism and Suprematism used art to convey socialist ideals, also referred to as Socialist Realism.

Other artists like Jacques-Louis David from the Neoclassical movement produced paintings influenced by political events; the subject matter also included themes like patriotism. Other artists include Pablo Picasso and his famous oil painting , Guernica (1937), which is a symbol and allegory intended to reach people with its message.

The above examples all illustrate to us that various wars, conflicts, and revolutions throughout history, notably World Wars I and II, have influenced both men and women to produce art that either celebrates or instigates changes in society. The power of art’s visual and symbolic impact has been able to convey and appeal to the masses.

Art Will Always Be There

The importance of art is an easy concept to understand because there are so many reasons that explain its benefits in our lives. We do not have to look too hard to determine its importance. We can also test it on our lives by the effects it has on how we feel and think when we engage with it as onlookers or as active participants – whether it is painting, sculpting, or standing in an art gallery.

What art continuously shows us is that it is a constant in our lives, our cultures, and the world. It has always been there to assist us in self-expression and telling our story in any way we want to. It has also given us glimpses of other cultures along the way.

Art is fluid and versatile, just like a piece of clay that can be molded into a beautiful bowl or a slab of marble carved into a statue. Art is also a powerful tool that can be used for the good of humanity good or as a political weapon.

Art is important because it gives us the power to mold and shape our lives and experiences. It allows us to respond to our circumstances on micro- and macroscopic levels, whether it is to appreciate beauty, enhance our wellbeing, delve deeper into the spiritual or metaphysical, celebrate changes, or to rebel and revolt.

Take a look at our purpose of art webstory here!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the importance of arts.

There are many reasons that explain the importance of art. It is a universal language because it crosses language and cultural barriers, making it a visual language that anyone can understand; it helps with self-expression and self-awareness because it acts as a vehicle wherein we can explore our emotions and thoughts; it is a record of past cultures and history; it helps with education and developing different skill sets; it can be financially rewarding, it can be a powerful political tool, and it adds beauty and ambiance to our lives and makes us feel good.

Why Is Art Important to Culture?

Art is important to culture because it can bridge the gap between different racial groups, religious groups, dialects, and ethnicities. It can express common values, virtues, and morals that we can all understand and feel. Art allows us to ask important questions about life and society. It allows reflection, it opens our hearts to empathy for others, as well as how we treat and relate to one another as human beings.

What Are the Different Types of Art?

There are many different types of art, including fine arts like painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking, as well as applied arts like architecture, design such as interior, graphic, and fashion. Other types of art include decorative arts like ceramics, pottery, jewelry, mosaics, metalwork, woodwork, and fabrics like textiles; performance arts like theater, music, dancing; and Plastic arts that work with different pliable materials.

What Is the Definition of Art?

The definition of the word “art” originates from the Latin ars or artem , which means “skill”, “craft”, and a “work of art”. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary offers several meanings, for example, art is a “skill acquired by experience, study, or observation”, it is a “branch of learning”, “an occupation requiring knowledge or skill”, or “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects”.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Why Is Art Important? – The Value of Creative Expression.” Art in Context. July 26, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/why-is-art-important/

Meyer, I. (2021, 26 July). Why Is Art Important? – The Value of Creative Expression. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/why-is-art-important/

Meyer, Isabella. “Why Is Art Important? – The Value of Creative Expression.” Art in Context , July 26, 2021. https://artincontext.org/why-is-art-important/ .

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It’s great that you talked about how there are various kinds and genres of art. I was reading an art book earlier and it was quite interesting to learn more about the history of art. I also learned other things, like the existence of online american indian art auctions.

I just love your article…I am an art teacher from Papua New Guinea – a developing country in Oceania (South Pacific). I was enthralled after reading your article and wish to hear more from you. I come from a country where art and culture are embedded in our tribal peoples from generation.

Hi John, thank you very much for your feedback, it’s great to see that art is something that works all around the world!

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MOST FAMOUS ARTISTS AND ARTWORKS

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The Importance Of Art In Society And How It Helps Us Flourish

• By The Studio Director Team
• November 2, 2023

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As a teacher or studio owner, you have an undeniable passion for the arts. Whether you specialize in ballet, piano, or oil painting, you know what it’s like to fall in love with art. The importance of art in society can’t be overstated, and it transcends far beyond borders or cultures. This is what we know about its major tangible and intangible benefits.

Why Is Art Important?

Art is all around us. Whether you hear your favorite song on the radio or drive by a gorgeous mural, you experience art every day. We know that these meeting points elevate our everyday experiences, but it’s common to lose sight of the overall impact of the arts on communities .

Our goal here is to dive into this topic and answer that question: “Why is art important?” By answering it with insights from research, we hope to provide studio owners and teachers alike with the solid information they need to share their love of the arts with their wider communities.

1. It promotes expression and creativity

As humans, we’re naturally drawn to art as a form of expression and communication. Toddlers love to draw, sing, and dance. It’s a way for them to express themselves before they’re verbal.

In fact, participation in the arts may even assist kids with language, motor skills, and visual learning development. Research indicates that young people who regularly participate in the arts are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement later on.

In therapy settings, art also provides an opportunity for digging deeper and expressing emotions that are difficult to discuss.

Art therapy activities can help children (and adults) cope with their circumstances, both past and present. In one important study, children between six and 12 were asked to draw a house as a distraction after thinking about something upsetting. This group was able to improve their mood when compared with children who were instructed to draw the negative event or simply copy another drawing.

2. It helps all of us develop necessary soft skills

The importance of art in society goes far beyond what we do in our free time. It can also help people work better.

When someone applies for a job, there are certain hard skills they need to have like data analysis or bookkeeping. However, many employers also understand the very important need for soft skills . These intangible attributes are hard to measure and often difficult to define. Some examples include a person’s ability to adapt to change, think creatively, or collaborate with team members.

The arts are a universal way to develop these necessary soft skills that make us better people and coworkers in the workplace.

3. It provides historical context

Art and human history go hand-in-hand. This is why people dedicate their lives to studying cave art, Shakespearean plays, and so much more.

When we take the time to dive into art created in the past, we can learn about other generations and eras. We can study art to find out what those before us were facing and how they overcame it. In the same way, future generations will learn about our current events through the art we leave behind.

As the The Metropolitan Museum of Art puts it: “Looking at art from the past contributes to who we are as people. By looking at what has been done before, we gather knowledge and inspiration that contribute to how we speak, feel, and view the world around us.”

4. Art leads to healthy and thoughtful cultural discussions

Art is often controversial or groundbreaking. And when art creates a stir, it has the potential to spark healthy conversations that lead to improvements across a society. Rather than impassioned debate, art gives us an opportunity to analyze, respond to, and create social change.

How does this play out in direct impacts? Surveys show that high school students in the United States who engage in the arts at school are twice as likely to volunteer than those who don’t. They are also 20% more likely to vote when they become young adults.

5. It gives us a place to gather as a society

Beyond personal development, the overall social impact of the arts is essential to understand. Cultures big and small unite through the arts to build better communities.

From fine art showings to community theatre in the park, the arts provide an opportunity to gather with other people from all walks of life. Several case studies have actually demonstrated that art in rural communities specifically can help boost economic growth. Further, it strengthens the bonds between people in these places.

It’s also worth noting the importance of art in society when it comes to tourism. Cities like New York City and Seattle are full of endless museums and theatres. But even in smaller communities across the United States, and the rest of the world, the arts provide unique economic opportunities. This type of tourism leads to jobs, revenue, and areas for growth.

The Art World Makes Life More Beautiful

Immersed in the art world, your commitment as an educator or studio owner is undeniable. Whether it’s ballet, piano, or oil painting that has captivated your heart, you understand what it means to truly experience art. The role of art forms in society is monumental, extending beyond any geographical or cultural boundaries. Here’s what we’ve learned about its profound and far-reaching impacts.

Art, particularly fine arts, serves as a powerful tool for self-expression. It provides a platform for human beings to articulate their deepest emotions and thoughts, fostering self-awareness and promoting healthy conversations. From the intricate brushstrokes of oil paintings to the rhythmic movements in ballet, each art form speaks a unique language that resonates with different perspectives.

The importance of art extends to our youth and future generations. By incorporating art subjects into education, we encourage young people to develop critical thinking and motor skills. Art lessons aren’t just about producing pop art or mastering ballet; they’re about understanding human history, from cave paintings to contemporary installations in art galleries.

Moreover, the study of art fosters a deeper understanding of the creative process. As art students delve into various art forms, they gain insights into the workings of the human brain and the power of creative expression. This knowledge prepares students to approach other subjects with an open mind and a keen eye for detail.

Furthermore, arts education fuels economic growth. By nurturing critical thinking, creativity, and innovation, we are equipping our future workforce with essential skills needed in the 21st-century economy. The arts provide a robust foundation for a well-rounded education, one that interweaves the beauty of fine arts with the practicality of real-world applications.

In essence, to study art is to engage in a timeless tradition of exploration and discovery. Through art, we can forge connections, facilitate dialogues, and inspire change. So let’s continue to celebrate and champion the arts, for the benefit of our society and generations to come.

Your Studio Makes An Impact

Whether you teach online art classes , lead a music school, or instruct dancers in a ballet studio, the work you do is so incredibly important. As an active member of your local arts scene, you have a direct impact on your students and larger community.

Studio Director is an all-in-one studio management software that gives you the gift of more time and flexibility to focus on these creative pursuits. We’re your behind-the-scenes partner that can automate the key administrative tasks that help your studio run smoothly.   Want to learn how Studio Director can help your team focus on the work they love? Schedule a free demo today !

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Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art.  It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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• Front Hum Neurosci

What Is Art Good For? The Socio-Epistemic Value of Art

Aleksandra sherman.

1 Department of Cognitive Science, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Clair Morrissey

2 Department of Philosophy, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Scientists, humanists, and art lovers alike value art not just for its beauty, but also for its social and epistemic importance; that is, for its communicative nature, its capacity to increase one's self-knowledge and encourage personal growth, and its ability to challenge our schemas and preconceptions. However, empirical research tends to discount the importance of such social and epistemic outcomes of art engagement, instead focusing on individuals' preferences, judgments of beauty, pleasure, or other emotional appraisals as the primary outcomes of art appreciation. Here, we argue that a systematic neuroscientific study of art appreciation must move beyond understanding aesthetics alone, and toward investigating the social importance of art appreciation. We make our argument for such a shift in focus first, by situating art appreciation as an active social practice. We follow by reviewing the available psychological and cognitive neuroscientific evidence that art appreciation cultivates socio-epistemic skills such as self- and other-understanding, and discuss philosophical frameworks which suggest a more comprehensive empirical investigation. Finally, we argue that focusing on the socio-epistemic values of art engagement highlights the important role art plays in our lives. Empirical research on art appreciation can thus be used to show that engagement with art has specific social and personal value, the cultivation of which is important to us as individuals, and as communities.

“What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and toward the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine. Art asks us to think differently, see differently, hear differently, and ultimately to act differently, which is why art has moral force.” — Jeanette Winterson (Winterson, 2006 )

Introduction

Traditionally, discussion of the nature of the arts and their role in our daily lives and communities lay within the purviews of criticism, art history, and philosophy. Within the last century, there has been a growing interest by psychologists and more recently, neuroscientists, to scientifically investigate art experiences and appreciation. Broadly, questions central to this investigation include:

• What happens when we experience a work of art? Specifically, what are the perceptual, emotional, and cognitive processes mediating our responses to art?
• Can one account for variations in taste? And if so, how does one's psychology and biology contribute to those preferences?
• What is common about the experiences one has across different forms of art? What is distinct?
• Are our responses to art universal or culturally and historically situated?
• Are art experiences pleasurable and how is the response distinct from other pleasurable experiences?

To scientifically investigate these questions, psychologists often ask viewers to rate the aesthetic appeal of an artwork, to rate their preferences for it compared to other artworks, and to indicate their emotional responses to various works. Typical questions might include: how much do you like the artwork; how aesthetically pleasing is the artwork; and how emotionally moving is the artwork? Researchers might then analyze the extent to which ratings reflect the formal features of that artwork—e.g., how balanced the composition is, how prototypical the depictions are, or perhaps how much the statistical structure within the image parallels natural scene statistics. As such, psychologists have identified a variety of formal features that seem to influence aesthetic and preference scores, including symmetry, color, contrast, aspect ratio, prototypicality, natural scene statistics, and complexity (e.g., Berlyne, 1971 ; McManus, 1980 ; Taylor et al., 1999 ; Shortess et al., 2000 ; Graham and Field, 2008 ; Schloss and Palmer, 2011 ). Similar questions have been explored in other domains of art including music and literature (e.g., Rentfrow and Gosling, 2003 ; Koopman and Hakemulder, 2015 ). Furthermore, many researchers have demonstrated that individual differences, be they stable or transient, can influence preferences and judgments. For instance, culture and experience (e.g., Reber et al., 2004 ; Bullot and Reber, 2013 ), expertise and knowledge (e.g., Winston and Cupchik, 1992 ; Silvia, 2006 ) and current emotional state (e.g., Eskine et al., 2012 ) shape judgments. Additionally, individual differences in perceptual capacities, such as visual-object working memory (VOWM) are associated with preferences for formal features such as visual complexity within visual artworks (Sherman et al., 2015 ). These findings aim to illustrate the importance of accounting for the between and within subject variability in preferences, emotional responses, or beauty judgments.

A complementary approach, neuroaesthetics, is concerned with investigating the neurobiological substrates of aesthetic experience. For example, studies employing fMRI often task participants with making aesthetic or emotion-related judgments, and have demonstrated that art appreciation activates a distributed network in the brain subserving three core neural systems: sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge. Important regions linked to aesthetic evaluation and preference for art include areas related to domain-specific processing such as the visual system for visual art (e.g., the lingual gyrus, middle occipital lobe), memory recognition (e.g., fusiform gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus), higher-order conceptual integration (e.g., anterior temporal lobe), emotion and reward (e.g., the anterior insula, caudate/striatum), valuation (e.g., anterior and ventromedial prefrontal cortices), and more recently metacognition (e.g., structures within the default mode network such as posterior cingulate cortex) (for reviews and meta-analyses, see Di Dio and Gallese, 2009 ; Brown et al., 2011 ; Chatterjee and Vartanian, 2014 ; Vartanian and Skov, 2014 ).

Notably, although the aesthetic sciences broadly concern themselves with explaining art appreciation 1 , what can be gleaned from the above findings is that they have, up to this point, primarily investigated experiences of the aesthetic. That is, scientists have privileged investigating individual judgments of beauty or preference, many times ignoring socially-relevant outcomes of art appreciation or the social context of art creation and art appreciation. This is the the case within both the psychological and neuroaesthetics literatures. For example, neuroaesthetics research typically uses art (paintings, music, poetry, dance performance) as a stimulus to determine the neural mechanisms associated with preference, beauty, sublimity, and pleasure-based responses (e.g., Blood and Zatorre, 2001 ; Kawabata and Zeki, 2004 ; Vartanian and Goel, 2004 ; Jacobsen et al., 2006 ; Ishizu and Zeki, 2011 ; Lacey et al., 2011 ; Brattico, 2015 ).

Empirically investigating art appreciation in this way, however, risks conflating the arts with aesthetics. That is, it risks reducing the study of the nature of the arts to their ability to cause a particular feeling of disinterested joy or pleasure in a beholder. This reduction is reflected in (i) the way neuroaesthetics frames and understands art—namely, as an object that one contemplates and experiences in a disinterested manner, (ii) in the focus researchers place on measuring judgments related to beauty, liking, and pleasure as primary “outcomes” of the art experience, and (iii) in the contexts in which aesthetic experience is studied, often in labs on computers, removed from social and historical contexts, and in the visual arts, over short viewing times rarely exceeding 15 seconds.

The prevailing use of these measures and contexts implies that what defines an art experience is the pleasure caused by interacting with something aesthetically pleasing, and that the primary scientific task is describing the perceptual and emotional processes related to, or which constitute, a moment of liking or joy. Such a reduction limits the range of human experiences and capacities identified as appropriate objects of scientific investigation in this field. Moreover, “able to cause aesthetic experience” is a philosophically dubious conception of the nature of the arts, and can be particularly problematic in cases where “beauty” or “disinterested pleasure” is not a productive theoretical framework for evaluation of an artwork, as in some modern and contemporary art forms (e.g., see Carroll, 2012 for review). Similar methodological critiques have been presented within music as well as other domains of art (e.g., Sloboda et al., 2001 ; Brown and Dissanayake, 2009 ). For instance, within the domain of music, much of the research investigates individuals' cognitive and emotional responses to passively listening to a musical piece (as well and the perceptual features that prompt such a response) discounting the social functions of the work.

Frameworks from the history of philosophical aesthetics and contemporary methodological discussion within empirical aesthetics can be particularly instructive for psychologists and neuroscientists interested in investigating the arts. As indicated above, philosophical attempts to define the nature of art by appeal to the kind of experience often studied by aesthetic science have been criticized for failing to fully capture or appreciate the social, cultural, or historical situatedness of the art-object or the person whose experience is being studied. Some empirical contextualist theories take a similar stance, recommending scientific investigations that go beyond the “basic exposure” mode of art appreciation, noting that the kind of knowledge one would gain from perceptual exploration removed from historical understanding is “shallow at best” (Bullot and Reber, 2013 ). Rather, psychology must embrace an enriched understanding of art appreciation by investigating how, for example, an individual causally reasons about the observable features and attributions of an artwork, “mindreads” or attempts to cognitively model the artist and her intentions, experiences discovery or understanding-based emotions, and generates theories about the relevant content, form, and function of the artwork (Bullot and Reber, 2013 ).

Relatedly, we suggest that the current scientific research on art appreciation discounts what many would consider the very essence of art: its communicative nature, its capacity to encourage personal growth, its ability to reveal deep aspects of the human condition, to challenge preconceptions, to help us reconceptualize a question we are grappling with, and to provide clarity on ambiguous concepts or ideas. A host of philosophical, art-historical, and critical theories of the nature of the arts, art appreciation, and artistic creative practice suggest a more general theoretical shift away from the project of empirically studying art-objects by focusing on individuals' phenomenological experiences, and toward one which recognizes that individual psychological experiences or habits are shaped by engaging with the arts as part of our communities and social fabrics (e.g., see Carroll, 2012 for review). For instance, some philosophers and scientists alike have claimed that the arts, broadly conceived, have moral value, suggesting that engaging with art can be potentially transformative, for it encourages us to consider the welfare and good of other people, enhancing both our moral compass and self-knowledge (e.g., Nussbaum, 1990 ; Koopman and Hakemulder, 2015 ).

Our primary goal here is to argue that a systematic scientific study of art appreciation must explain the potentially broad-ranging and diverse social outputs of arts engagement, and thus, must go beyond measurements of aesthetic pleasure or liking. We advocate for the need to embrace an expanded empirical research program characterized by reframing the arts as socio-epistemically valuable —that is, specifically useful for gaining knowledge and insights about oneself and society. Importantly, we suggest that an empirical research program that recognizes the arts as social practices (which we expand in Section Arts-Appreciation as Socio-epistemically Valuable) can potentially unify prior research and more clearly specify the types of investigations needed to achieve a fuller understanding of art appreciation.

For instance, information-processing accounts of art appreciation aim to understand the relationship between inputs (e.g., formal features, transient individual differences like emotional or mood states, and more sustained individual differences in personality, culture, historical contexts, or expertise), processing mechanisms unfolding related to the art experience (e.g., the psychological and neurobiological substrates of perceptual, cognitive, and emotional processes, or disruptions to one's self-schema), and outputs (e.g., appraisals/judgments of liking, epiphany/transcendence, self/other-understanding; well-being). Fitting to our art-as-social-practice view, we suggest that researchers might begin to investigate the information-processing system through the lens of socially-related outputs, such as self and other understanding, rather than through the lens of aesthetic outcomes of art (see Table ​ Table1). 1 ). That is, how do brain structures like the default mode network, which is recruited during art appreciation, contribute to socio-epistemic outcomes of art appreciation like self-understanding? This focus may reveal the need to develop experimental approaches better suited to evaluating the nature of the arts which recognize how creative practices and appreciation are cultivated socially, over long periods of time, and sustained both at the community and the personal level.

Factors influencing art appreciation.

An information processing account of art appreciation denoting self and other referential processing as well as the immediate and longitudinal socio-epistemic outcomes. Note that this table lists factors and processing mechanisms relevant to art appreciation but does not highlight the temporality or connectivity between the factors. For a review of models that differ on these dimensions, see Pelowski et al. ( 2016 ) .

Below, we start by framing the arts as social practices that are embodied, enactive, and communicative. Although our art as social practice organization is not in contrast to information processing accounts, it importantly allows us to focus empirical evaluations on the cluster of skills that are developed through art appreciation. Among these skills, we focus specifically on those we refer to as socio-epistemic, and demonstrate that self- and other-understanding are both socially relevant and meaningfully cultivated through sustained art engagement.

Arts-appreciation as socio-epistemically valuable

We begin by situating arts engagement, and specifically art appreciation, as a communicative, dialogic, dynamic, and transformative practice rather than as passive contemplation of beautiful, pleasurable, or otherwise aesthetically interesting objects. We argue that an “art as social practice” framing like this raises more relevant, interesting, and psychologically rich questions about the arts than does the traditional framing of art appreciation as reducible to aesthetic experience.

The arts as social practices

In Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (2015), Wolterstorff argues that we should adopt MacIntyre's account of social practices as a framework for understanding the nature of the arts (Wolterstorff, 2015 ). MacIntyre ( 1984 ) defines social practices as:

…coherent and complex form[s] of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended (p. 187).

As forms of human cooperative activity, they exist within social groups, both large and small, and persist through time. Consider, for example, the social practice of portraiture, a genre of painting which depicts a human subject, often in which the face is the main theme. This genre has existed historically across many, varied communities, and the genre develops and is shaped by the cultural, economic, and moral commitments of various social groups, in addition to the artistic styles and technological developments within these communities. “Painting a portrait” is done with respect to norms, standards, and expectations of the genre that are, in an important sense, public. Moreover, these norms and standards constitute criteria for having created an excellent portrait. That is, we can individually and collectively deliberate and debate about whether some particular artwork is a portrait, or is a good portrait. Furthermore, accomplishments such as ‘mastering the ability to depict a complex emotional expression in a two-dimensional medium’ (Leonardo DaVinci's Mona Lisa ), or ‘successfully communicating the cruelty of poverty and dignity of poor people by rendering sympathetically and beautifully the humanity of someone who is poor’ (e.g., Dorothea Lange's, Migrant Mother ), are goods that can only be achieved through the practice of portraiture. Finally, the genre, itself, develops throughout time, within different communities. There are innovations in portraiture with respect to artistic style and with respect to technology. Consider, for example, how Henri Matisse's Green Stripe (Portrait of Madame Matisse) both radically departs from and conforms to the norms of the practice, or how the invention of photography changes and informs the meaning of “creating a portrait.” Matisse's innovation and the development and use of photography for artistically depicting human faces, both enrich our understanding of the aims of art and the possibilities of human experience.

By following this emphasis on the arts as practices, we mean to shift attention to art creation and art appreciation as activities “we do,” from the conception of art appreciation as passive reception of perceptual information from art-objects. In doing so, we do not commit ourselves to any particular theory or definition of art, be it the institutional view (Danto, 1964 ; Dickie, 1974 ), which holds that artworks are artifacts that have been identified as such by persons appropriately situated with respect to “the artworld,” 2 or the historical (Levinson, 1979 ) or narrative views (Carroll, 1988 ), which hold that artworks can be identified by relationships to existing artworks. Instead, we follow these traditions, and others in anthropology and sociology (e.g., Becker, 1982 ; Dissanayake, 1990 ; Gell, 1998 ; Harrington, 2004 ), in their recognition that both arts appreciation and art creation, whatever they may be, are culturally situated within human communities 3 . We contend that this very foundational and basic recognition is largely absent or significantly downplayed in current empirical work, and it is this sense of social—longstanding practices, embedded in the fabric and life of communities—that is foundational to our proposed framework.

The arts and socio-epistemic skills

One model for how to understand art appreciation as active engagement in a practice can be found in Kieran ( 2012 ). There, he argues that art appreciation is an intrinsically valuable skill that allows one to cultivate “excellences of character,” because practiced arts engagement allows one to better imagine and critically examine not only aesthetic qualities of artworks, but also “artistic originality, emotional expression, insight and moral understanding.” (p. 23) This notion of skill has a few different features that matter a great deal to an expanded empirical research program: (1) art appreciation is learned through sustained practice, suggesting its intrinsic relationship to the culture and community, or, at least, to other people; (2) is a capacity that is developed over non-trivial lengths of time; and (3) may be relevant to other domains, as skills can be transferable.

Drawing from other philosophical literature on art appreciation, we see a focus on what we refer to as socio-epistemic skills. Included in this category may be capacities like good judgment, richer sensitivity to detail, or, following Hume, “delicacy of imagination, good sense, comparative experience, and freedom from prejudice” (Kieran, 2012 , p. 23). What makes these skills social is their relationship to one's ability to better understand oneself and other people, and to potentially revise one's own moral, political, or social commitments 4 . Although the mechanism for enhanced understanding of self and others is not fully theorized in the philosophical literature, it is often taken to be developing a kind of sensitivity to detail, context, or nuance (e.g., Murdoch, 1970 ; Nussbaum, 1990 ; Carroll, 1998 ).

Empirical research complements the philosophical framework above by helping us understand the mechanisms that underwrite the particular socio-epistemic skills of other-understanding and self-understanding 5 . We choose to highlight self-understanding and other-understanding because they align well with what many think of art appreciation as doing: helping them see others and the world from a different point of view, altering their perspectives, and helping them to understand more about themselves (e.g., what moves them, or what makes them uncomfortable). At the same time, we do not mean to commit to any specific or direct causal pathways between cognitive processes, art appreciation, and other- or self-understanding. Rather, we mean to identify this as an open area of much needed investigation.

Before turning directly to this discussion, we also note that embracing this theoretical shift toward understanding the arts as social practices would allow us to explain how art appreciation is partially constitutive of living a flourishing human life. A longstanding empirical program has been to connect the arts (both appreciation and creation) to happiness, well-being, or flourishing. For instance, Cuypers et al. ( 2012 ) demonstrate through a large-scale population study that both art appreciation and art creation are associated with increased well-being (as measured by perceived health, life satisfaction, and anxiety and depression scores). Philosophical conceptions of eudaimonia contend that a flourishing human life centrally involves, at least, the use of skills or excellences of character the development of which are intrinsically rewarding, and the exercise of which are, thereby, pleasurable. Thus the shift we are recommending does not discount previous research, but rather, locates and explains the liking, preference, and pleasure responses to art-objects as well as the experience of being moved, as important aspects of the skill-based conception of art appreciation. This also allows us to strengthen arguments for the value of the arts that does not embrace crass instrumentalism, but rather, is capable of explaining the central role of the arts in human life (Kieran, 2012 ). Moreover, regardless of whether one is committed to the broader eudaimonistic theory of well-being, or the claim that the development of human excellences and skills is central to that flourishing, those who hold that art appreciation is capable of developing the capacities and related skills of other-understanding and self-understanding are making empirical claims that empirical aesthetics can evaluate. To that end, a complete model of aesthetic appreciation will also need to contend with these claims and find a place for these socio-epistemic “outputs” in their models.

In the sections that follow, we use philosophical discussions to frame and suggest two lines of empirical inquiry within this theoretical orientation of the arts as social practices. The first, self-understanding, discussion of which is nascent in both the psychological and philosophical literatures, asks whether and how art appreciation as a practice can lead to a richer understanding and appreciation of one's own moral values, commitments, and conception of who and what one is. The second, other-understanding, more fully developed in both literatures, asks whether and how art appreciation as a practice can lead to a better understanding of the emotional and cognitive states of others, and the potential moral and social value of such an understanding. We conclude with a discussion of how such a research program may be envisioned and developed moving forward.

Art engagement as a path to self-understanding

As discussed above, in this section we attempt to lay a foundation for a line of inquiry into how self-understanding may be enhanced by engaging in practices of art appreciation, as part of our suggestion that conceptualizing the arts as social practices would be an appropriate and fruitful framework for psychologists and neuroscientists to embrace.

Philosophical conceptions of the relationship between art appreciation and self-understanding

In philosophy, the term “self-knowledge” often refers to knowledge of one's own mental states—that is, knowledge of our own beliefs, thoughts, or sensations. In contrast, “knowledge of the self” can refer to knowledge or understanding of one's “self” and its nature. Following Gertler ( 2015 ), we may include under this heading four different debates about our understanding of ourselves, as selves: the nature of self-identification (i.e., one's ability to distinguish one's self from others); whether self-awareness is a mechanism for grasping the nature of the self; whether self-awareness is a means to grasping one's personal identity over time; and, whether and what sort of self-understanding is necessary for rational or moral agency.

Insofar as engagement with the arts is able to enhance some notion of self-understanding, it fits most comfortably within this final debate: the sort of self-understanding necessary for rational or moral agency. Martin ( 1985 ), providing one way of enriching this “necessary for agency” conception, claims that self-understanding is an achievement . He explains that developing a “justifiable and meaningful perspective on our lives” often calls for “appropriate adjustments in attitude, emotion and conduct,” and realizing these things is something that we work for, or that we strive to accomplish. (p. 2) Relevant to this kind of self-understanding is what we may refer to as “self-identity”—“individuals' subjective senses of who they are—their own self-images” (Martin, 1985 , p. 5). Further, we may consider the heart of self-identity as a set of commitments or values—be they intellectual, artistic, moral, or religious—that organize individuals' behavior, attitudes, and beliefs. Someone who has proper self-understanding not only recognizes and affirms her central commitments and values, but also acts and feels according to these commitments and values. In this way self-understanding is a socio-epistemic skill because one's ability to recognize and act on her central values (e.g., feel and act compassionately) concerns a social ability. The content of the values or commitments substantially refer to other people, institutions, histories, and communities, and the attitudes and behaviors indicated are learned and exhibited within communities and relationships.

Philosophers who defend the view that art appreciation is a form of moral understanding can inform our conception of how art appreciation may enhance self-identity and self-understanding. A particularly influential view is Noël Carroll's clarificationism (Carroll, 1988 ). Unlike the sciences, which allow individuals to acquire new propositional knowledge, Carroll argues art appreciation is capable of deepening our existing knowledge, something he refers to as “understanding.” Carroll suggests that the narrative arts, in particular, encourage us to apply our moral knowledge and emotions to a specific case, which aids in the development of our capacity to manipulate, refine, or clarify what we know, and to then intelligibly apply that knowledge. Carroll uses the example of Crime and Punishment to explain this point. It would be absurd to claim that the reader learns the truth of the proposition “murder is wrong” from her reading of the novel. In fact, it may be that a reader would already need to have this bit of propositional knowledge in order to make sense of the novel in the first place. Yet, engagement with the novel can be a source of moral understanding and self-development. Engagement may help give shape to, clarify, or deepen one's understanding of the horror of killing, and of the nature or importance of guilt, redemption, and moral character. Moreover, insofar as these moral beliefs and values are part of the central commitments and values that constitute your self-identity, engagement with the novel can help you know yourself better.

That art is a context for deepening understanding rather than gaining propositional knowledge is also taken up by Lopes ( 2005 ). There he argues that the kind of seeing (“seeing-in”) cultivated by practiced visual art engagement enriches moral sensibility by enriching the suite of intellectual resources that make the viewer reliable at discriminating morally relevant features of situations. (p. 180) Part of the moral sensibility Lopes describes includes what he refers to as a repertoire of moral concepts (e.g., solidarity, grief, violation). Some visual art, though not all according to Lopes, can be used to deepen and understand those concepts. In this way, some visual art can communicate moral ideas in new or challenging or poignant ways that cause one to revise an important or closely held moral value, and thus, can be important to developing one's self-understanding.

Although the philosophical discussion of self-understanding or transformation through engagement with the arts primarily concerns moral or social knowledge, we see no reason to believe it must be limited to these contexts. The focus on moral knowledge in the philosophical literature may be occasioned by the felt need to distinguish the arts from the sciences as a means of knowing, as the latter tend not to have this moral or social focus 6 . However, we may think of the arts as a path to non-moral self-understanding as well, or, as above, as about non-moral yet central commitments and understandings important to our self-identity. For example, the works displayed during the 2013–2014 Los Angeles County Museum of Art retrospective of the work of Light and Space artist James Turrell, were described by many (critics and lay people alike) as transformative . The immersive light environments cause one's own perception to become the object of reflection, and led many to a deeper understanding of themselves and their relationship to the external world, deepening their conception of themselves as embodied beings whose access to the world is mediated by a visual perceptual faculty with particular features, limitations, and abilities, and of light, itself, as a physical substance. This fact (that perception is mediated by light) is not one that people learn from this exhibit; people learn that in middle school science classes. But being confronted with artistic works that exploit and make manifest this fact nevertheless affords viewers an understanding of the significance of this fact.

Enhanced self-understanding through art appreciation: empirical evidence

As in the philosophical literature, there also seems to be limited work in the psychological literature focused on the importance of art engagement in cultivating self-understanding, although research on self-reflection may speak to the psychological mechanisms that make possible the socially-relevant conception of self-identity as described above. Following Koopman and Hakemulder ( 2015 ), self-reflection refers to “thoughts and insights on oneself, often in relation to others and/or to society” (p. 82). This type of introspection often relates to one's emotions (e.g., monitoring current states and/or comparing those states to prior states), memories, values, and beliefs, and is associated with positive consequences (e.g., better mental health, well-being, increased capacity for self-regulation).

The literary arts are a domain in which self-reflection has received more comprehensive attention. Koopman and Hakemulder review evidence suggesting that self-reflection is elicited when one reads literary texts characterized by unconventional syntax or semantic features. Specifically, they review empirical work showing that self-reflection occurs in scenarios in which “(i) [reader's] previous personal experiences are evoked by descriptions of characters, places and events, (ii) [in which] readers experience emotional responses to the characters, and (iii) [in which] readers perceive the text itself, the artifact, as striking” (p. 95). Self-reflection elicited through reading in these contexts is likely to relate to one's self-understanding and identity both in moral and non-moral contexts. Similarly, some members of the medical community have embraced the idea that the literary and narrative arts facilitate self-reflection. Brady et al. ( 2002 ) posit that practicing self-reflection outside of a clinical context, and particularly through art appreciation, could lead to better doctor-patient relationships and, thereby, better patient outcomes.

With respect to visual art, research in neuroaesthetics has also suggested that when engaging with artworks that are emotionally moving and potentially transformative, individuals may have an inward, self-reflective focus. Here, being moved refers to “intensely felt responses [such as tears or chills] to scenarios that have a particularly strong bearing on attachment-related issues—and hence on prosocial bonding tendencies, norms, and ideals—ranging from the innermost circle of one's personal life … to higher-order entities of social life (one's country, social and religious communities)” (Menninghaus et al., 2015 , p. 8; see also Hanich et al., 2014 ; Wassiliwizky et al., 2015 , 2017a ). Recent work by Wassiliwizky et al. ( 2017b ) suggests, for example, that poetry containing a socio-cognitive component (e.g., prose addressing other people or personifying nature) is particularly moving, leading to chills and a response in brain areas involved in self-reflection (e.g., precuneus). When an artwork moves a beholder, she likely experiences an intense emotional response as well as explicitly reflects on her experience, potentially exercising self-understanding (as well as other-understanding, which we expand on in the next section). In this way, understanding the experience of being moved (rather than just focusing on aesthetic evaluation) indicates a promising avenue of research for neuroaesthetics to develop in line with our recommendation to adopt a social practice model.

Indeed, Vessel et al. ( 2012 , 2013 ) have demonstrated that during intensely moving aesthetic experiences, the default mode network—a network of brain areas including the precuneus, medial frontal cortex, inferior parietal cortex, and medial temporal cortex known to be involved in self contemplation, self reflection, and self-referential thought—is recruited. In Vessel et al.'s ( 2012 , 2013 ) studies, participants were tasked with attending to a set of visual artworks and judging how moving each one was while their brain activity was recorded in a scanner. Their finding that DMN activity was higher for artworks rated as highly moving relative to those rated lower on the scale may be interpreted as an inward, self-reflective focus that co-occurs with or is prompted by being emotionally moved. Additionally, this finding is consistent with research demonstrating that the DMN is recruited during other self-referential types of tasks involving self-identity (namely, making judgments about yourself or close others), moral decision-making, and theory of mind attributions (Northoff and Bermpohl, 2004 ; Northoff et al., 2006 ).

Psychologists have also described models that center the idea that art appreciation recruits metacognitive processes and promotes self-reflection and transformation. For example, Pelowski and Akiba ( 2011 ) (see also Pelowski, 2015 ; Pelowski et al., 2017 ) argue that influential empirical studies of aesthetic experience focusing on understanding the processes which lead to cognitive mastery of an artwork along with perceptual pleasure are “often divorced from a viewer's personal beliefs and identity” and “preclude the possibility for art to [truly] mark and transform lives” (p. 81) namely because they do not directly address discrepant experiences during an art encounter. According to Pelowski and Akiba's account, the self-reflective processing that occurs when a beholder's expectations have been violated (e.g., confusion about meaning) marks the beginning of a meta-cognitive re-assessment of an artwork, eventually leading to self-schema transformation. Similarly, Lasher et al. ( 1983 ) argue that the arts are central for mental and emotional growth because they offer opportunities for representational conflicts that, when resolved (in their case, often unconsciously) provide a way to restructure and unify initial mental representations. The process of defamiliarization, “becoming unsettled,” and self-reflecting, then may be crucial to deepening self-understanding.

In a more recent paper, Pelowski ( 2015 ) offered an empirical approach to studying art experiences as they relate to self-transformation and understanding. Specifically, Pelowski suggests that feeling like (or actually) crying during an art experience is a physical indicator of self-reflection, shifted perspectives, and self/schema changes. As a first foray into testing his model, Pelowski conducted a series of exploratory studies at several museums collecting both physiological data and self-reports from museum-goers. He demonstrated that feeling like crying while viewing art is correlated to increased self-awareness, feelings of epiphany and insight, as well as to mixed emotions corresponding to being moved. Although his empirical findings are specific to the visual arts, his model broadly appeals to all arts, as tears or chills responses are pervasive across all arts domains (Pelowski, 2015 ). Pelowski's approach is particularly instructive as it offers a means to frame socio-epistemic skills such as self-understanding within information-processing accounts, arguing for the importance of empirically investigating how each processing stage corresponds to self-related outcomes.

Importantly, these ideas are markedly different from the more typical information-processing accounts of aesthetic experience (e.g., Leder et al., 2004 or Chatterjee, 2004 ), which focus more on successful assessment of an artwork's formal information (perceptual and cognitive mastery) in the service of emotional appraisals. This traditional approach de-centers the importance of self-reflection or cognitive growth as an outcome or aspect of art appreciation. In contrast, the paradigm we suggest (which parallels Pelowski's) posits that although detached, the contemplative pleasure, which may be an outcome of art appreciation, is not valuable merely for its own sake, but also instrumentally valuable for deepening one's self-understanding.

Although the reviewed studies are not direct evidence that self-understanding is developed by art appreciation, they suggest, at least, that self-reflection, a process relevant to cultivating self-understanding, is prompted by moving art experiences. More research will be needed to understand the extent to which and how neural mechanisms correlated to self-referential processing are recruited during art appreciation. Candidate regions for investigation are those within the cortical midline structures including the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex (OMPFC) implicated in the continuous representation of self-referential stimuli and in processing emotional stimuli independent of sensory modality, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) implicated in evaluation of self-referential stimuli, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) implicated in monitoring of self-referential information, and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and adjacent precuneus thought to be involved in self-reflection and the integration of self-related representations (e.g., Northoff and Bermpohl, 2004 ). The partially overlapping default mode network as described above will also be critical to evaluate in the context of art appreciation.

Art engagement as a path to understanding others

Turning away from self-understanding, in this section we lay a foundation for a line of inquiry into how other-understanding may be enhanced by engaging in practices of art appreciation. Though here we highlight self- and other-understanding as separate socio-epistemic skills, we also point to the importance of investigating these “outcomes” as highly related. As before, the aim of this section is to build our suggestion that conceptualizing the arts as social practices would be an appropriate and fruitful framework for psychologists to embrace.

Philosophical conceptions of the relationship between art appreciation and other-understanding

Philosophers of art commonly contend that art appreciation enables us to understand others better by encouraging us to take on their viewpoints, to metaphorically take a walk in their shoes, to feel their pain. Through art appreciation we can understand ourselves as connected to one another, by recognizing others' emotions, actions, and perceptions as fundamentally similar to our own, or, more dramatically, by feeling others' emotions. For instance, in Cohen's ( 1993 ) discussion of his ambivalence toward ontological questions about the nature of art and the distinction between high and low art, he describes a memorial service in which his friend's favorite musical selections were played. Reflecting on the meaningfulness and appropriateness of this practice of playing music that someone cared for at their funeral, Cohen writes:

My friend has died and is not present. I listen to music I know he cared for. It is a fact about my friend that he cared for this music, perhaps even a constitutive fact about his sensibility: it partially defines who and what he was. It is, thus, an entrance into that sensibility. I sit listening, not merely thinking that this music meant something to my friend, but bending my imagination to the task of reaching and comprehending an aspect of my friend which responded to this music, that is, feeling what it was to be my friend (p. 154).

Here, Cohen understands artistic appreciation not only as (appropriately) playing a central role in an important social ritual of mourning, but also, or perhaps because it is one way of being in community with someone else. In this case, the mind, sensibility, or self of the person who is no longer present is accessible through attending closely to the music he loved. Similarly, Joseph Conrad characterizes the emotional sharing involved in artistic activity as:

the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts; to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspiration, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn (cited in Goldie, 2008 , p. 192).

This notion, that the arts are an arena for interaction and potential emotional sharing between artists, beholders, and other past, present, and future beholders has an important history stretching back to at least Tolstoy ( 1899 ), if not to Aristotle.

The kind of interaction or connection art facilitates has been thought to lead to a fuller and morally important understanding of others and oneself. Kieran ( 1996 ) develops a notion of “imaginative understanding,” a skill promoted by the arts, as striving to “appreciate what the appropriate way of looking at and acting in the world is…typically…the appropriate way to feel for, to regard, and to respond to others” (p. 341). In this way, art appreciation, by promoting imaginative understanding, facilitates good moral judgment by enhancing our moral perception and sensibilities, especially with respect to the lived experiences of other people 7 .

Developing a similar line of thought, some scholars have suggested that reading literary fiction creates aesthetic distance, which “allow[s] [readers] to experiment more freely with taking the position of a character different from themselves, also in moral respects” (Koopman and Hakemulder, 2015 , p. 92). That is, the dynamic process occurring during art appreciation is a form of socio-cognitive and emotional training, granting viewers the “time and privacy to learn to deal more strategically with” real life scenarios in a safe, “distant” space (this idea has been discussed by Oatley, 1999 , 2016 ; Robinson, 2005 ; de Botton and Armstrong, 2013 ; Koopman and Hakemulder, 2015 ; Menninghaus et al., 2017 ). Despite this “distance” or, perhaps because of it, one can become deeply invested in fictional characters, emotionally engaging with them, and generating cognitive models of character's minds, just as one does in real social scenarios 8 .

That arts appreciation can deepen one's moral landscape by cultivating other-understanding is an empirical claim with potentially far-reaching consequences 9 . This idea has served as a theoretical foundation for arts-based therapies aimed at developing, for example, autistic children's social skills and theories of mind (see: arttherapy.org). Perhaps most robustly, as we briefly mentioned, in recent decades medicine has increasingly turned to the arts to help students and professionals cultivate proper self- and other-regarding dispositions (Shapiro et al., 2009 ). For example, Columbia University's Masters of Science curriculum in Narrative Medicine uses the arts and humanities to “imbue patient care and professional education with the skills and values of narrative understanding” (see: http://ce.columbia.edu/narrative-medicine ). Some have suggested that arts-based interventions help physicians become more empathic and culturally-sensitive, which then leads to better patient health outcomes (e.g., Novack et al., 1997 , pp. 502–509), whereas others have focused on the importance of reflection and imagination for developing insight, emotional understanding of patients, or other valuable “patterns of knowing” (e.g., Berragan, 1998 ; Rodenhauser et al., 2004 ; Averill and Clements, 2007 ).

These theoretical applications demonstrate the importance of reviewing the available empirical evidence that aligns with an argument that art appreciation cultivates other-understanding, the importance of understanding the psychological mechanisms underlying other understanding, as well as the importance of establishing norms for empirically investigating more fully the socio-epistemic outcomes and values of art appreciation.

Enhanced other-understanding through art appreciation: empirical evidence

Psychological research suggests that there are (at least) two related ways we can come to understand other people and their experiences: (i) cognitively, and (ii) emotionally “resonating” with others' experiences. Cognitive empathy, also often called “cognitive perspective-taking,” “theory of mind,” “mentalizing,” or “mindreading,” 10 refers to an individual's capacity to model others' experiences by making inferences about their intentions and predictions about future actions based on that mental representation. Although this cognitive process reflects one's capacity to model other people's minds, it crucially does not require emotional investment (e.g., I may understand that you are anxious but I do not feel that way myself).

Another way, then, to understand other people is to have an “insider” view by actually experiencing what the other person is experiencing. This “catching” of another person's experience is what most scholars refer to as empathy. Although there are many definitions for empathy in the psychological and philosophical literature (see Batson, 2009 ), most scholars broadly agree that there are two key criteria characterizing empathic responses. Firstly, empathy involves an affective capacity to recognize and resonate with others' emotions (also widely called “emotional contagion” or “affect sharing”). The affective response should be isomorphic with another person's affective state (Eisenberg and Fabes, 1990 ; De Vignemont and Singer, 2006 ). That is, one must experience the same emotion as another person, rather than simply respond emotionally to someone else's emotion (e.g., happiness in response to someone else's misfortune would not be isomorphic). This isomorphism is emphasized in the literature as distinct from related phenomena such as sympathy, which may be emotionally powerful but is usually thought of as feeling “for” rather than feeling “with.” Secondly, empathy should involve an awareness of the source of one's affective response; that is, a mechanism to distinguish between self and other. Imitation or emotional contagion alone, seen even in young infants, does not then reflect empathy (e.g., De Vignemont and Singer, 2006 ), as true empathy requires a more developed sense of self, agency, and other. Here, we will refer to this process as affective empathy.

Echoing the philosophical discussion above, a wide empirical research program has suggested the social and moral importance of both affective empathy and cognitive empathy, arguing that they are critical for social development and successful social interaction. Individuals with impaired (or a lack of) affective empathy are often characterized as psychopathic (e.g., Hare, 1991 as cited in Blair, 2005 ), and individuals with impaired theory of mind, a characteristic of autism, exhibit a host of social deficits including difficulties communicating, understanding others' thoughts and desires, recognizing and imitating others' facial expressions, among other issues (e.g., Blair, 2005 ). Moreover, although there might sometimes be negative consequences of increased empathy (e.g., favoring social “in-groups”; in Bloom, 2017 even goes to suggest that empathy has more costs than benefits), cognitive and affective empathic capacities in many ways provide a foundation for moral behaviors (Decety and Cowell, 2015 ). For instance, even short-term manipulations of cognitive perspective-taking can lead to increased feelings of social affiliation, perceived similarity, perceived closeness, intergroup understanding, desire to engage in intergroup contact, and to prosocial behaviors such as increased cooperation, sharing, comforting, and helping even in situations where prosocial attitudes might be more difficult to adopt (e.g., Stephan and Finlay, 1999 ; Bodenhausen et al., 2009 ; Wang et al., 2014 ) 11 .

In addition to its social importance, empathy provides an individual with knowledge about the environment without having to actually experience it oneself; for example, seeing someone get burned when they touch a hot stove or get bruised when they fall on a pavement is informative enough to attach appraisals to those situational contexts without having to experience the pain oneself (De Vignemont and Singer, 2006 ). This characteristic of empathy resonates with the aesthetic distance conception of fiction above, explaining how art appreciation could be a “safe space” for understanding others' difficult or taxing emotional experiences.

If art appreciation indeed enhances other-understanding, it would be reasonable to expect that we would find evidence, at least in some contexts, that engaging with art, be it viewing visual art, reading literature, or listening to music, recruits mechanisms associated with cognitive and affective empathy. For example, there may be evidence demonstrating that the neural mechanisms implicated in affective or cognitive empathy during real social interactions are also engaged when “interacting” with visual art or with fictional characters. Furthermore, art appreciation should mirror findings within the social interaction literature, such that after art-appreciation-based manipulations, we may find increases in self-reported perceived similarity and closeness, and perhaps increased degree of prosocial behavior exhibited toward an individual. Finally, we should expect that repeated “practice” or engagement with arts would develop empathy, perhaps changing aspects of one's disposition, personality, and capacity to empathize in future situations. Below, we review empirical evidence in line with each of these predictions, with the aim of demonstrating the promise and possibilities of the shift to a social practice framework in neuroaesthetics.

Simulation, embodiment and arts-engagement: neural mechanisms

Some researchers within neuroaesthetics have begun to reconsider arts engagement as a fully embodied, enactive experience (e.g., Freedberg and Gallese, 2007 ; Nadal et al., 2012 ), with empirical evidence suggesting the involvement of neural processes related to both perspective-taking and affective empathy during art appreciation. One such model of the role of embodied responses to visual arts is presented by Freedberg and Gallese ( 2007 ). They suggest that embodied responses occurring during art appreciation are forms of cognitive and affective simulations and, as such, play a role in facilitating an understanding of both the representational content of an artwork and of the intentions of the artist. Freedberg and Gallese provide several examples demonstrating that viewers have physical, “felt” responses to visual representations, even if those representations are abstract. For instance, the authors speculate that viewing a painting like Caravaggio's Incredulity of Saint Thomas , in which a man is poking at someone else's wound, or experiencing Michelangelo's Prisoner's , in which the figures appear “trapped” in the material out of which they are sculpted, leads to embodied responses of physical pain in the beholder. Moreover, elements within a visual artwork that simply imply the gestures used by the artist (e.g., canvas cuts as in artist Lucio Fontana's work, or Jackson Pollock's drip paintings) can also strongly activate the motor cortex, and are thus felt by beholders as actions (Battaglia et al., 2011 ; Umilta et al., 2012 ).

More evidence for action simulation during art viewing is provided by Leder et al. ( 2012 ) who demonstrate that we covertly simulate actions produced by a visual artist while we engage with the work. That is, when viewing work by Georges Seurat, for example, we may covertly “stipple” our hands, whereas while viewing art by Vincent Van Gogh, we may covertly create broader strokes with our hands. Interestingly, when the researchers experimentally manipulated participants motions to either be explicitly aligned or misaligned with painting style, preference scores were affected. That is, participants in congruent groups (stippling while viewing works in the Pointillist tradition or stroking while viewing works with strong brushstrokes) reported liking the artworks more than those in incongruent groups suggesting that incongruent motions interfered with motor resonance (Leder et al., 2012 ). Researchers have similarly discussed the role of embodiment with respect to music as well as the literary arts. For instance, research has demonstrated that we develop embodied understanding of characters within a literary text (for comprehensive reviews see Koopman and Hakemulder, 2015 ; Oatley, 2016 ). One such example is seen in Hsu et al. ( 2014 ) who demonstrate that immersion or “getting lost in” emotion-laden literary text—in their case, fear-inducing compared to neutral excerpts from the Harry Potter series—leads to increased activation of the medial cingulate cortex, a structure associated with affective empathy.

Together, this research suggests that engagement with visual art may prompt beholders to mentally simulate artists' actions, and to “feel” the actions and emotions depicted in a work. Although we do not mean to suggest that simulation alone implies social understanding, as is evidenced by the fact that even very young infants (or primates) imitate without a developed theory of mind (e.g., Heyes, 2001 for review) it seems to have clear social value . Thus, embodied responses (what some refer to as “feeling into” art) may prompt meaning-making and explicit reflection (e.g., Pelowski, 2015 ). Importantly however, the extent to which mirroring, simulation, and empathy affect art appreciation and even aesthetic evaluation remains understudied.

The neural processes that are implicated in embodied emotion and action simulation, namely a medial frontotemporal network involving recruitment of the bilateral anterior insula, the dorsal and middle anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), as well as a mirror-neuron system (MNS), are implicated in empathy and theory of mind, and are important for representing both our own and others' actions (e.g., Decety and Grèzes, 2006 ). For example, Wicker et al. ( 2003 ) show that overlapping areas of the ACC are activated when one is imagining, observing, and expressing a disgusted facial expression. Similarly, Morrison et al. ( 2004 ) showed overlapping activation in the anterior insula and ACC both when a person was in physical pain and when she was viewing someone else in pain 12 . These responses can be modulated by a variety of factors, including dispositional/trait empathy, relationship between empathizer and target, situational context, and emotional context (e.g., De Vignemont and Singer, 2006 ). For example, in one study, electromyography was used to demonstrate that people with high affective trait empathy were more likely to automatically imitate happy and angry pictures of faces during passive viewing than people with low affective trait empathy (Rymarczyk et al., 2016 ).

With respect to visual art, a recent study similarly showed that trait empathy correlated to both physiological (facial electromyography and skin conductance responses) and behavioral responses to art (valence, preference, interest) (Gernot et al., 2017 ). Specifically, they showed that individuals who are high in emotion contagion are more moved by, interested in, and enjoy visual art. These high emotion contagion individuals also reacted more strongly to emotion congruent aspects of the visual art (e.g., they smiled while engaging with positive valence work and frowned when engaging with negative valence works). Similar findings have been reported within music, in which individual differences in empathetic capacities relate to understanding and interpretation of emotional expressivity and intentionality in music (Wöllner, 2012 ; Baltes and Miu, 2014 ). In this way, the empirical evidence points to a role for empathy in synchronizing emotion-relevant perceptions and actions among individuals, perhaps for understanding others more effectively, a skill art engagement may facilitate.

Another important set of neural structures—specifically within a lateral frontotempoparietal network (relevant regions include: lateral and medial PFC, lateral and medial parietal cortex, and medial temporal lobe, temporoparietal junction, and posterior superior temporal sulcus)—have been shown to correlate with tasks related to cognitive empathy such as action observation, imitation, self-recognition, impersonal moral and social reasoning, reappraisal by focusing on physical events, and categorizing affect in facial expressions (e.g., Lieberman, 2007 ). There is also a connection between this network and the mirror neuron network discovered in primates. In primates, mirror neurons activate both when the primate performs a goal-directed action and when it observes the experimenter performing the same action (Gallese et al., 1996 ). In humans, homologous regions of cortex (premotor cortex, LPFC, LPAC, DMPFC) similarly respond both to action observation and to imitation (e.g., Carr et al., 2003 ). Along with the regions that are implicated in embodied emotion and action simulation described above, these structures may be target regions of interest for neuroaesthetics.

The evidence linking neural processes recruited during other-understanding to art appreciation as reviewed above is promising. Perhaps the mirror neuron system (and other neural processes related to mentalizing as reviewed above) play an important role in enabling an experiential understanding of the content of a visual artwork as well as some of the artist's intentions (Freedberg and Gallese, 2007 ). Though more research is crucial, the findings up to this point suggest that engaging with art involves processes relevant to the attribution of mental states to others (Steinbeis and Koelsch, 2009 ; Koopman and Hakemulder, 2015 ), and this suggests that art appreciation is deeply connected to other-understanding.

(Pro)social effects of art appreciation

Based on the presented evidence, if cognitive and affective empathic processes are recruited during art appreciation, just as is observed for empathy manipulations, we should observe increases in measures such as self-reported perceived similarity, closeness, or degree of prosocial behavior exhibited toward an individual after arts-appreciation-based manipulations. Again, the literary arts are an example domain where research has been particularly comprehensive. The effect of reading literature, and more specifically, narrative fiction on empathy and other-understanding has recently received widespread attention (see Koopman and Hakemulder, 2015 ; Oatley, 2016 for comprehensive reviews). For example, Kotovych et al. ( 2011 ), find that the “challengingness” of the text, operationalized as the complexity of characters and number of ambiguities in a text, helps readers better identify with, feel more connected to, and understand a character more deeply. One explanation for such an effect is that when a literary text leaves more information about the narrator's mental life implicit and ambiguous, readers may be more likely to draw from their own experiences, resulting in a seemingly stronger connection with and understanding for an individual.

Further, psychologists have demonstrated both correlational and causal effects of reading narrative on various measures of empathy. Measures of empathy in these cases include the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test,” which probes one's ability to discern another individual's thoughts from their eyes alone (RMET; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001 ), or the Yoni test, which asks participants to identify others' affective and cognitive states from facial expressions (Shamay-Tsoory and Aharon-Peretz, 2007 ). Researchers have demonstrated that individuals who spend more time reading literary or narrative fiction compared to non-fiction tend to score higher on such tests suggesting that extended “practice” reading narrative fiction may cultivate one's capacity for understanding others (e.g., Mar et al., 2006 ; Panero et al., 2016 ). And, a recent series of experiments by Kidd and Castano ( 2013 ) demonstrated that individuals who were tasked with reading a “literary” short story that is characterized by unconventional syntax, ambiguity, and semantic features scored higher on the RMET and Yoni tasks after the reading exercise compared to those who read a popular fiction or nonfiction short story. This finding demonstrates that even brief exposure to the arts might promote other-understanding.

Importantly, empathy-related processing during arts appreciation across domains (e.g., beyond just the literary arts) also seems to lead to increased prosocial behavior. For example, Sze et al. ( 2012 ) demonstrated that after watching film clips that induced empathetic concern, individuals tended to be more charitable. Interestingly, these prosocial effects were partially mediated by age such that older participants were more charitable than their younger counterparts. Although not directly related to film appreciation per se (as film in this case was merely a stimulus meant to elicit empathetic concern), it is suggestive both of the power of film and the cultivation of prosocial tendencies with art experience. Film's power to move the viewer in this way has also been associated with increased feelings of intergroup connectedness and understanding (Oliver et al., 2015 ). Likewise, some research suggests that chills induced by music lead to more altruistic behavior, though more research is needed to tease apart the influence of factors like mood (Fukui and Toyoshima, 2014 ). Taken together, these findings suggest the importance of a continuing research program on the (pro)social implications of arts engagement.

Although these effects seem promising, many of the claims about empathy cultivated through art appreciation are contested. For instance, some researchers have been unable to replicate the causal effects (most recently, Panero et al., 2016 ), noting, like Bullot and Reber ( 2013 ), that a brief encounter is typically “shallow” and is unlikely to have significant impacts on cognitive or affective empathy. This is not altogether surprising as measures like the RMET are likely relatively stable across time. And, even if it appears that art engagement increases state empathy—that is, empathic responses during the interaction—the single engagement may not cultivate empathy in the long term in real-life scenarios the way that researchers hope. It is not inconceivable that an individual connects to fictional characters described as in a particular situation, but would not connect to real people in that same situation 13 . Furthermore, it is theoretically unclear why individuals who read a story just once, or even those who are well-read, should be better attuned to discriminating facial expressivity per se . Rather, it might be that narrative fiction develops imaginative capacity. In fact, research by Johnson ( 2012 ) finds that reading fiction can actually lead to decreased perceptual accuracy in discriminating fearful emotions. Johnson speculates that such reduced discriminability is likely due to a bias in attributing emotions, particularly ones congruent with a prosocial behavior, to ambiguous expressions. Similarly, research attempting to quantify the effects of both brief and longer-term art encounters on empathy and patient outcomes for medical professionals is contested and still underdeveloped (e.g., Perry et al., 2011 ; Yang and Yang, 2013 ; Kelm et al., 2014 ). Finally, there is conflicting evidence on the extent to which thrills-like responses affect schemas and behavior. For instance, the physical chills response that some individuals report in response to music as well as to visual art and literature does not always seem to differentially affect prosocial behaviors or self concept, relative to artworks that do not elicit chills (Konecni et al., 2007 ). Thus, more empirical studies are needed to systematically address how art appreciation actually affects other-understanding.

We began this section by reviewing philosophical views that hold or imply that art appreciation is socio-epistemically valuable insofar as it cultivates other-understanding through processes like emotional sharing or imaginative understanding. Following these ideas, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun to empirically assess whether and how art appreciation deepens other-understanding. Empirical research has up to this point demonstrated that art appreciation engages similar psychological processes that are involved in social interaction, such as emotional resonance, mental state attribution, and cognitive perspective taking. Furthermore, we reviewed evidence that showed that increased “practice” appreciating the arts, arts-appreciation “interventions” (as in medical school curricula), and even “basic exposure” to the arts (as in Kidd and Castano, 2013 ) increased individual's capacities for other-understanding. Although it is promising, the empirical and philosophical research centered on the relationship between art appreciation and other-understanding is still limited in its scope, quantity, and specificity. Particularly important will be to develop robust (perhaps more longitudinal) methodologies that demonstrate the processes by which arts appreciation cultivates other-understanding as well as its relationship to self-understanding, leading a flourishing life, and other socio-epistemic skills.

Looking ahead

In this paper, we aimed to highlight how understanding the power of the arts in our lives requires going beyond the current aesthetics-focused conception of the outcomes of art appreciation. Rather than neuroaesthetics models which focus nearly exclusively on judgments of beauty, preference, or liking as the primary outcomes of art appreciation, we should set ourselves to better understanding the range of socio-epistemic outcomes of such engagement. Here, we have focused on self-understanding and other-understanding as such outcomes, but do not intend to limit the potential of this framework shift to just these outcomes. Rather, we aimed to provide evidence for the fruitfulness of neuroaesthetics adopting a more comprehensive approach to the outcomes of art appreciation that mirror the richer conceptions of art engagement found in philosophy, art history, and art criticism, which understand art as an embodied, enactive, social practice.

Importantly, such an approach does not discount prior empirical research, but refocuses its aim around socio-epistemic skills developed within arts practices. In thinking of the arts as social practices that people engage in, we can come to better understand how they serve a variety of social and cultural values. We hope this approach inspires empirical research to more fully investigate the specific ways in which the processes underlying art engagement cultivate socio-epistemically valuable skills. That is, how do specific emotional experiences lead to self-understanding? To other-understanding? And to other socio-epistemic values? How does engagement with different art forms relate to distinct socio-epistemic values? Does engagement with literary art, for example, more promote a particular set of values, compared to practiced engagement with the visual arts or music?

To answer these questions, researchers will need to go beyond the typical unitary measures of preference after a single exposure, and instead employ more longitudinal designs incorporating both state and trait based measures. Take for example a researcher interested in whether and how engaging with particular form of visual art (e.g., art depicting minority groups such as American Indians) may deepen ones cultural understanding and appreciation. To go beyond standard designs, one might consider (a) encouraging viewers to engage with each artwork for longer periods of time (e.g., at least 1 minute), (b) comparing lab findings to naturalistic settings (e.g., conducting experiments in both settings to determine generalizability of lab results) and (c) combining methodologies (e.g., eye tracking, physiology, EEG, subjective self-reports such as being moved, interest, emotional state, and written reflections). Possible individual difference measures that researchers may employ include tests that measure capacity for cognitive and affective empathy [e.g., the Empathy Quotient (EQ; Lawrence et al., 2004 ), the Interpersonal Reactivity index (IRI; Davis, 1980 ), or the questionnaire of affective and cognitive empathy (QCAE, Reniers et al., 2011 )], tests that measure state and dispositional aspects of self-awareness [e.g., the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS; Brown and Ryan, 2003 ), self concept clarity questionnaires, tolerance for uncertainty, Webster and Kruglanski, 1994 ], tests that measure emotion perception and regulation (e.g., the scale of subjective emotion experience (See; as in Pelowski et al., 2017 ), and subjective self reports relevant to one's art experience including art expertise, interest, reflections and insights. Furthermore, researchers may adopt experimental techniques from the mindfulness and meditation literature, which similarly aims to demonstrate the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional effects of mindfulness practices as compared simply to mindful states. Thus, we see our reframing as an exciting opportunity for researchers to be creative in designs (see Table ​ Table2 2 for examples of open questions).

Open questions.

Outstanding questions for investigating the psychological and neurobiological relationships between self-understanding, other-understanding, and art appreciation .

Further, this kind of “art as social practice” approach encourages scientists to view art engagement, generally, be it appreciating or creating, as a form of knowledge acquisition and production. Although we focused here on art appreciation, we believe our approach generalizes to art creation. Like art appreciation, art making involves practices which integrate embodied and “mental” activities so as to render the two inseparable. In fact, the philosophical and psychological research on creation and creativity recognizes and investigates such processes of creative practice associated with individual development more so than does the research on art appreciation.

Finally, we believe that focusing on the socio-epistemic skills cultivated through art engagement highlights the important role art plays in our lives, and the need to advocate for arts education programs. Through this kind of research program, we should come to better understand the arts as socially valuable. We suggest that empirical research can be used to show that engagement with art has social and personal value, rather than monetary or economic value, the cultivation of which is important to us as individuals, and as communities.

Author contributions

All authors listed have made substantial, direct, intellectual contributions to the work, and approved it for publication.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Anjan Chatterjee, Simon Penny, Dylan Sabo, Sarah Ostendorf, Ainsley LeSure, Santiago Mejia, and the two reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this argument.

1 Recent arguments by influential researchers such as Pearce et al. ( 2016 ) suggest that neuroaesthetics is often concerned not with explaining art appreciation, but rather with understanding the aesthetic qualities of objects that include the arts. However, findings within the aesthetic sciences are often used to explain art appreciation, specifically (e.g., Pelowski et al., 2016 published a review article titled “Visualizing the Impact of Art: An Update and Comparison of Current Psychological Models of Art Experience” in which they do just that).

2 While it may be that the kinds of social practices we are talking about relate to “artworld” institutions, practices are logically independent of and prior to institutions (see MacIntyre, 1999 for the relationship between practices and institutions).

3 The kind of theoretical shift we recommend—toward understanding the arts as practices—is also related to Noë's ( 2015 ). There, he develops an account of the arts as organized activities , insofar as they are: (1) natural or primitive, (2) “arenas for the exercise of attention, looking, listening, doing, undergoing” (p. 6), (3) structured and organized in time, (4) emergent, and which (5) have a function and (6) are a source of pleasure for those who engage in them (pp. 4–5). This approach is similar to the social practice account in that it is interested in the role of the arts in structuring a well-functioning or flourishing human life. It differs on the strength of the emphasis placed on the embodied nature of the arts, and in the expressed biological and “natural” interpretation it gives to these practices through the notion of “organizing” that it employs.

4 See Stolnitz ( 1992 ) for discussion of the philosophical debate about aesthetic cognitivism, which is concerned with whether we can learn from or know through art appreciation.

5 In doing so we do not claim that these are the only valuable socio-epistemic skills developed by the social practices of the arts or arts appreciation. For example, the “Seven C's” identified by Koelsch ( 2014 ) (social contact, social cognition, co-pathy, communication, coordination of actions, cooperation, social cohesion) is a taxonomy of what the author refers to as social functions of music. Similarly, other researchers including Panksepp ( 2009 ) highlight the social importance of music evolutionarily, particularly in its capacity to evoke social emotions.

6 Another hypothesis about this focus on moral knowledge may come from the overlap in moral and hedonic processing, evidence for which may be found in Tsukiura and Cabeza ( 2010 ).

7 Kieran's argument draws on the rich discussion of moral understanding and art appreciation, especially that of Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum. Iris Murdoch argued that engagement with and creation of art (especially painting and literature) hone moral perception by tuning the perceiver to the salient features of moral reality; the arts make one's moral perception more discriminating and discerning. That is to say, engagement with the arts develops one's ability to see the world as it truly is, making art “the most educational of all human activities.” (1970) In Love's Knowledge Nussbaum contends that moral imagination, necessary to good moral judgment (and seeing the world as it truly is), is similar to artistic imagination (1990). She explicitly links the type of fine-grained attention to detail and ability to “see” the world in morally complex and nuanced ways cultivated by arts appreciation with the development of self and other-understanding.

8 There is some disagreement among philosophers about what cognitive process best characterizes this emotional-engagement, theorists variably refer to identification, empathy, sympathy, and mental simulation (see Giovannelli, 2005 ).

9 Some researchers have gone so far as to speculate on the socio-cultural benefits of arts engagement in relation to other-understanding. In his book, The Better Angels of our Nature , Pinker ( 2012 ) speculates that a decrease in contemporary violence can be partially attributed to increased literary consumption, relying on the notion that perspective-taking is fundamental to reading literature and that it leads to increased empathy and other-understanding.

10 We gloss over here some of the nuances that distinguish each of these terms. For instance, theory of mind is most often discussed in a developmental context, in contrast to cognitive perspective-taking and cognitive empathy. However, for the most part, they refer to the same/a very similar process.

11 Heyes ( 2001 ) provides an analysis of theories and evidence describing the relationship between imitation, theory of mind, and social cognition. Heyes points out “although it is plausible that the experience of imitating and being imitated contributes to the development of theory of mind, there is not currently a well-supported theory specifying the nature of the contribution” (p. 260).

12 Additionally, Singer et al. ( 2006 ) demonstrated that the proposed neural networks subserving empathy indeed represent “true” empathizing with another person, rather than just imagining one's own emotional experience. They first engaged participants in a game in which confederates played either fairly or unfairly. They then showed the same participants videos of their fair and unfair partners experiencing pain, while simultaneously measuring participants neural activity. Interestingly, all participants empathized with fair players, but only female participants empathized with the pain felt by unfair players experienced. In contrast, males seemed to experience more joy (evidenced by activation of reward circuitry), indicating their seeming desire for revenge against unfair players.

13 Philip Sidney wrote a sonnet about just this point in the 1580s: http://www.bartleby.com/358/46.html

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The impacts of art in the society

Introduction

Art has always been an essential aspect of human culture and society, and it continues to play a vital role today. Throughout history, art has been used as a means of expressing ideas, emotions, and beliefs. In this article, we will explore the importance of art in society and why it is crucial for individuals, communities, and the world as a whole.

The Benefits of Art

Art is essential for several reasons. It can bring people together, promote critical thinking and creativity, and even have therapeutic benefits. Art is an effective tool for communication, allowing individuals to express themselves and convey messages that may be challenging to articulate through words. Art is a universal language that can be used to connect people across cultures, languages, and backgrounds.

Art and Education

Art education is also critical in today’s society. Art programs in schools provide students with a creative outlet and promote critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Studies have shown that exposure to art in schools can improve academic performance, increase self-esteem, and even reduce stress levels.

Art and Society

Art can also shape society by bringing attention to social and political issues. Many artists use their work as a means of addressing social inequality, injustice, and other societal problems. Art can also promote cultural awareness and understanding, helping to bridge gaps between different communities and promote diversity.

Art and the Economy

Art also plays a significant role in the economy. The art industry employs millions of people worldwide and generates billions of dollars in revenue each year. The creation and sale of art have a significant impact on local economies, creating jobs and stimulating economic growth.

Types of Art and Their Impact on Society:

Visual Art: Visual art encompasses a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, and digital art. Visual art has the power to inspire, provoke thought, and bring people together. It can reflect societal issues, cultural identity, and historical events, and has the potential to evoke strong emotional responses from viewers.

Music: Music is a universal language that transcends borders and brings people together. It has the power to convey emotion, communicate ideas, and express cultural identity. Music has been used to protest societal issues, promote social justice, and provide a form of entertainment and relaxation for individuals.

Dance: Dance is a powerful form of self-expression that can communicate ideas, emotions, and cultural traditions. It has the potential to bring people together, promote physical fitness, and reflect societal issues.

Literature: Literature is an essential aspect of culture, reflecting societal values, beliefs, and traditions. It provides a means of exploring complex ideas, emotions, and experiences and can inspire personal growth and empathy.

Tips to Engage with Art:

• Attend galleries, museums, or music events: Engage with art by attending galleries, museums, or music events in your community. These events provide an opportunity to explore different forms of art and connect with artists and other art enthusiasts.
• Join an art club or organization: Joining an art club or organization can provide a supportive community for artists and art enthusiasts. These groups offer opportunities for networking, workshops, and exhibitions.
• Create art: Creating art can be a therapeutic and fulfilling experience. You don’t need to be a professional artist to create art – start with something simple like drawing or painting, and see where it takes you.
• Support local artists: Supporting local artists by purchasing their art, attending their events, and sharing their work on social media can help to promote art in your community.

Benefits of Art Education:

Art education provides numerous benefits to individuals and society, including:

• Promoting creativity and critical thinking skills
• Encouraging self-expression and individuality
• Providing an outlet for emotional expression
• Enhancing cultural awareness and understanding
• Improving academic performance and cognitive development

Economic Impact of Art:

Art has a significant economic impact on society, contributing to job creation, tourism, and cultural industries. The art market is a multibillion-dollar industry that includes galleries, auction houses, and art fairs.

How Art Can Address Social Issues:

Art has the potential to address social issues and promote social change through:

• Raising awareness and promoting dialogue about societal issues
• Providing a platform for marginalized voices and perspectives
• Challenging societal norms and stereotypes
• Promoting empathy and understanding across cultural divides

Q. How can I learn more about art?

In conclusion, art is an essential aspect of human culture and society. It promotes creativity, critical thinking, and communication, and it can also have therapeutic benefits. Art education is critical in schools, and exposure to art can improve academic performance and reduce stress levels. Art can also shape society by addressing social and political issues and promoting cultural awareness and diversity. Finally, the art industry has a significant impact on the economy, creating jobs and stimulating economic growth. Therefore, it is crucial to recognize the importance of art in society and to continue to support and promote its creation and dissemination.

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What Is the Artist’s Role in Society?

Katie Carey | October 24, 2017 (Updated June 23, 2022)

Anna Dean in her studio at  The McColl Center . In this photo, she is seen working on an art project for Atrium Health about the impact of Covid-19. 

We asked artists around the world: “ what is your role as an artist in society, your local community, and the world at large”.

Every artist plays a different and necessary part in contributing to the overall health, development, and well-being of our society.

Creative thinkers and makers provide their communities with joy, interaction, and inspiration, but they also give thoughtful critique to our political, economic, and social systems — pushing communities to engage thoughtfully and make steps toward social progress.

From documenting human history to expressing collective emotions, these nine artists from around the world tell us how they view their role as creative contributors.

On the Quiet Moor by Lesley Birch

Artists are a vehicle for expressing universal emotion..

Art is about connecting with people’s emotions. It’s personal and at the same time, universal.

I’m an expressive painter, working from the landscape and my memories. And yes, my work is personal, although it may not seem so at first. Feelings about my relationship with my mum, dad, and family creep into the work.

It’s a human urge to express emotion through the medium of mark-making. We all carry with us memories of our past experiences.  

An artist has the ability to ‘feel strongly’ to be ‘sensitive’ to things and express this in the paint, gesture, or color. The artist ‘absorbs’ the atmosphere of a place or the memory of a feeling. Sometimes, it’s a burden for the artist to carry all this emotion – to be so sensitive.

Most folks block out emotion. Then, suddenly, a painting ‘speaks’ to them. At that point, the artist has done their job. For me, it is wonderful to connect with people through my work   — when people respond to a painting and really ‘feel’.   My painting is mainly about my self-expression communicated out there on the canvas, but really I think it is everyone’s expression  — I’m just a vehicle.

Everybody hurts. Everybody loves. Everybody hopes. And, everybody dies. Mainly, art is about our own sense of mortality.

Lesley Birch , York, UK

@ lesley_birch, wind by nina fraser, artists are responsible for unearthing the truth..

I believe that the artist's role, above all things, is to be as true to themselves as they can — within society, the community, and the world at large. This sounds like a cliche but is in itself much harder than it seems.

Being an artist involves wearing all sorts of masks, just like any other job, but the difference is we have the lingering responsibility to unearth the truth of things. Sometimes we will seem vulnerable, sometimes we will make mistakes. But the main thing is not to give up.

This resonates with people on a personal and global level, because it is not only empowering but starts from inside ourselves. Before deciding to follow my own artistic path, I co-founded a community arts cafe. This was an amazing experience in itself, but as it wasn't my true vocation I felt there was a limit to how much I could give. This is because I started from the outside in, trying to fix things around me, before realizing I needed to tap into something central to myself.

Nina Fraser , Portugal

@ nina.fraser , @ _ninafraser_  .

Kiss my...  by Ginny Sikes

Artists work to illuminate the margins and make societal changes..

Rather than the word "role," I prefer "commitment." Over many years as an arts educator, I have helped people and communities find their voices and express their concerns through individual and collaborative art projects. This used to be called public art. Now, it is often known as social practice. 

My own work is rooted in feminism –  where expressing my emotions, goals, and ideas, in the realm of the personal, social and political, is an exercise in communicating my individual experience. Working with artists and in art spaces in other parts of the world, beautiful exchanges of ideas often happen – which creates artistic growth, empathy, and new understandings. 

All of these acts can illuminate what lies hidden or repressed in the margins or shadows. New ideas can be brought to life. These ideas can lead to small or large changes in attitudes and even society.

Ginny Sykes , Chicago, USA

De Negen Bargen, Noordsche Veld, Zeijen by Maarten Westmaas

They tell stories and pass on traditions.

Holland is a crowded space. Our history is filled with stories about how we made land out of the water and tamed the deadly seas. Honored by writers, poets, and painters. The word ‘landscape’ stems from the Dutch word ‘landschap’: View of the land. It was invented here in the 17th century, with low horizons and great cloudy skies.

Millions of landscapes were painted here by the great masters as Rembrandt, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Weissenbruch, Mauve, van Gogh and Mondriaan. All were inspired by our flat landscape and big horizons. It is this centuries-long tradition in which I stand. ‘Creating the Dutch landscape’ is my motto, my theme, and my life.

But, our landscape is changing. Our ever-growing population is altering the look of the land. Cities grow and our landscape history is sinking beneath concrete, buildings, and tarmac.

So, as an artist, I not only want the world to see the beauty of the Dutch landscape, but I also want to grow awareness about the lasting visible traces in the landscape. From our 5000-year-old megalithic monuments to our recent day modern windmills. As a photographic detective, I search for stories about our landscape.

We have to be careful with this landscape which is difficult with so little space and more than 17 million inhabitants. That's why I decided to donate 10 percent of all my income to the organizations that protect the Dutch landscape. That's the least I can do as an artist — t o protect the horizon.

Maarten Westmaas , the Netherlands

@ maarten_westmaas , @maarten.westmaas.dutch.landscape.

Peace by Shih Yun Yeo

Artists connect with and inspire people globally.

As we live in a global village, we are somehow all connected via some form of social media. Artists are no longer hermits and we are all "out there [in the world]". I hope my role as an artist is to inspire, connect, and collaborate!

My abstract works are paintings and drawings at the same time. Paintings of geometric and organic shapes and lines, composed of layers of ink, acrylic, and other mediums allude to the gestural surface marks of Abstract Expressionism. My paintings reflect not only with the radical conflict between the two "colorless" colors (black and white), but also their interaction and interdependence. There is a historical richness here, the temporal quality of landscape ink painting, the physical strength and boldness of the black ink, and its generosity and infinite possibilities. 

Shih Yun Yeo , Singapore

Untitled #15 by bruno castro santos ,  2017, color pencil and graphite on paper, 33x46cm , artists record and preserve our human history.

We live in an ever more intricate society where every individual regardless of its specific role plays an important part in the social biodiversity of the world.

Artists have been crucial from the very beginning of our existence. From prehistoric cave paintings to frescos around the world, to scientific drawings, to the avant-garde movements, artists have contributed to expanding human evolution from many different perspectives.

This expansion, much like the universe, is still going on and artists still play an important role. I see myself as part of a community whose work as a global force contributes to this human growth.

There is a crescent complexity in the way the art world evolves and the myriad agents who orbit around it are intimately interlaced with artists and their production. Although artists typically work alone in their studios, they are part of a much larger community and they play a much larger role than one might anticipate.

Bruno Castro Santos , Lisbon, Portugal

@ bruno.castro.santos, industrial & urbex: 'whitstable wharf' (uk ) by aleta michaletos, artists offer messages of hope.

I take my role as an artist very seriously, although I still have endless amounts of fun and experience great joy in my studio. I try to be very thoughtful and socially and politically aware of my surroundings.  Whenever I experience feelings of discomfort in my life, I need to find an answer by transforming those feelings through my art.

An artist's role is almost that of an Alchemist — capable of transforming a few humble materials into objects which are imbued with spiritual and aesthetic value and then possibly also material value.

I prefer to be a harbinger of good news and hope, in this increasingly broken world of ours and I find that images have immense power to restore collective emotional pain and lift the spirit. 

Because I transform my own anguish concerning the present and also the future into something tangible which is simple, hopeful and beautiful, my role is to offer through my art and without being superficial, a message of hope to society, my community and the world at large.

Aleta Michaletos , South Africa

Parrsboro weir by poppy balser, they are ambassadors of the natural world..

I have always lived within walking distance of the ocean. I feel my role as an artist is to be an ambassador for the natural beauty that is found here. I paint out-of-doors as often as I can to get the clearest vision I can of my surroundings. That helps me capture it the most the highest level of truth.

I make my paintings to capture the parts of our landscape that I cherish and find beautiful. In doing so, I am preserving views that may disappear without notice. Think of all the paintings made of the Northwest landscapes that are now records of what those environments looked like there before the wildfires that have swept so much of that part of the continent.

One of my recurring subjects is the herring weir, which is made of nets to catch wild herring. The weirs are largely unique to the Bay of Fundy. When I was young there were herring weirs everywhere; they were commonplace. Now, they are almost all gone. I now have to travel a fair distance to paint the remaining ones while they are still here. These rather odd assemblages of netting might not mean much to people who have no connection to this area, but they are instantly recognizable to the people from here, who find great meaning in my paintings of the weirs.

I go out to paint the things that I find beautiful, never knowing what might someday become extra special because it, too, may no longer be easily seen outside of paintings. I put my paintings out into the world so that people who will never get a chance to come here might still be moved by the views of this place. 

Poppy Balser , Canada

@ poppybalser , @ poppybalserpaintings.

Polychrome by Steve Immerman

Artists create a sense of community..

There are many roles that an artist fills. But, in smaller cities, having local artists brings a sense of pride to the community. It also sets examples for young people who might be considering careers in the arts. Artists support their communities by teaching their art and craft.

Also, in most communities, there are auctions that benefit local causes and charities, and donations of art by local artists are some of the most popular items at these auctions. 

Steve Immerman, United States

@ docimmer , @ clearwaterglass, share this article, related articles.

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Making art is a uniquely human act, and one that provides a wellspring of health benefits

Professor of Art Therapy Research, Drexel University

Disclosure statement

Girija Kaimal receives funding from the national Endowment for the Arts, Drexel University, Department of Defense, Johns Hopkins University and the Prasad Family Foundation.

Drexel University provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

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When you think about the word “art,” what comes to mind? A child’s artwork pinned to the fridge? A favorite artist whose work always inspires? Abstract art that is hard to understand?

Each of these assumes that making art is something that other people do, such as children or “those with talent.”

However, as I explain in my book “ The Expressive Instinct ,” art is intrinsic to human evolution and history. Just as sports or workouts exercise the body, creating art exercises the imagination and is essential to mental as well as physical well-being.

I am a professor of art therapy who studies how creative self-expression affects physical and emotional health. In our clinical research studies, my colleagues and I are finding that any form of creative self-expression – including drawing, painting, fiber arts, woodworking or photography – can reduce stress , improve mood and increase self-confidence.

As a sickly child who needed to stay home from school a lot, I found that making art helped me cope. Today, creating art is my sanctuary. I use it as a sounding board to better understand myself and a way to recharge and learn from the challenges of life.

The uniquely human attribute of creativity

Although everyone has their own concept of what defines art, one thing is universally true: Creativity is a defining feature of the human species.

How so? Well, human brains are not computers processing data. They are biological prediction machines that perceive the environment through memories and the senses, with the capacity to use that information to imagine plausible future scenarios.

These inherent predictive and imaginative capacities are the wellspring of humanity’s abilities to survive and thrive – because self-expression is a safety valve that helps us cope with uncertainty. No one truly knows the future; they must live each day not sure of what will happen tomorrow. Art can help us all practice this imaginative muscle in a useful way.

In our study examining brain activity while using virtual reality tools to create 3-D digital artwork, my team demonstrated that creative expression is a natural state of being . The brain naturally uses fewer cognitive resources to be expressive and creative, compared with the brain power needed to do a rote task that requires conscious effort.

Seemingly ordinary everyday activities can provide opportunities to tap into one’s natural creativity and imagination: whipping up a meal from leftovers, figuring out an alternate route to work, dancing a little jig in response to hearing a song, or planting and tending a garden.

We have repeatedly found in our studies that even a single session of real and honest self-expression can improve self-confidence and reduce feelings of stress , anxiety and burnout .

This is partly because creativity activates reward pathways in the brain. Using our hands and bodies to express ourselves activates dopamine pathways and helps us feel good. Dopamine is a neural messenger that is associated with feeling a sense of hope, accomplishment or reward . Our brains are wired to secrete feel-good hormones whenever we move , create something or engage in any type of expressive activity.

Tapping into the creative resources within is one of the most underrated seeds of well-being in the world.

By comparison, bottling up or denying these feelings can cause distress , anxiety and fear because we have not processed and expressed them. This is probably one of the reasons why every community around the world has its own creative and expressive practices. Even our ancestors in Indigenous communities all around the world intuitively knew that self-expression was essential to emotional health and social connection.

Being unable to share our lives, keeping secrets and feeling isolated and lonely tend to worsen our health . To our brains, social isolation feels like a chronic disease because it interprets this loneliness and inability to express as a threat to survival.

Since creative expression can engage the senses, it can also be a body workout: a sensual as well as emotional and cognitive experience. Being active in expression – be it art, music, dance, drama, writing, culinary arts or working with nature – imparts a sense of confidence and hope that challenges can be navigated and overcome .

The role of art therapy

Given the integral role of art in our lives, it makes sense that making art can help people manage transitions, adversity and trauma, such as the stresses of puberty, the death of a loved one or experiencing a serious illness .

According to a global study, 1 in 2 people will experience a mental-health-related challenge in their lifetime , whether from life’s challenges, genetic predispositions or a combination of the two.

This is where art therapy can come in. Art therapy is a regulated mental health profession in which clinical psychotherapists with extensive clinical training offer psychotherapy to patients with diagnosed mental health needs.

The origins of art therapy go back to attempts to treat soldiers struggling with post-traumatic stress during the 20th century’s two world wars. Today there is evidence that traumatic experiences tend to be stored as sounds, images and physical sensations in the brain. When someone lacks the words to process these experiences through traditional talk therapy, art therapy can provide an indirect way to express and externalize those feelings and memories.

One of art therapy’s unique strengths is that it provides nonverbal ways of communicating, processing and eventually managing the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In fact, in a recent study, my team has found that a personal history of trauma is related to how people react to evocative images . Images of distress and pain resonate with us when we have known similar kinds of distress ourselves. This implies that our life stories make us sensitized to distress in others and even personalize it more.

Creative self-expression is especially relevant in coping with trauma because it provides an outlet through which a person can regain a sense of agency and control.

How to bring creativity into daily life

For those new to exploring art as a creative pursuit or for well-being reasons, engaging in creative activities begins with letting go of unrealistic expectations. Being creative isn’t about becoming a famous artist or even a mediocre one. It is about allowing ourselves to flex the creative muscle that we all have and enjoying all the sensory and emotional aspects of imagining.

Next, think about activities that made you feel free to explore when you were a child. Did you like singing, playing in the outdoors, dancing, making up pretend plays, or writing little tales? Allow yourself to indulge in any and all of these creative pursuits that made you feel relaxed and joyful.

A cultural tradition , tinkering with electronics, making a gift for someone or simply paying attention to everyday beauty – any of these can be a creative activity. And just like any muscle, the more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes. Over time, you will notice yourself getting more confident and adventurous in your creative practices.

Whatever it is, make time for this creative pursuit every week – which is possibly the hardest step of them all. If it seems “unimportant” compared with the demands of daily life, such as work or family, try thinking of it as another form of sustenance.

Remember that creativity is just as critical to human health as eating nutritious meals or getting exercise and good rest . So as the Latin saying goes: “Plene vivere.” Live fully.

This article is part of Art & Science Collide , a series examining the intersections between art and science. You may be interested in:

Literature inspired my medical career: Why the humanities are needed in health care

I wrote a play for children about integrating the arts into STEM fields – here’s what I learned about interdisciplinary thinking

Art and science entwined: This course explores the long, interrelated history of two ways of seeing the world

• Mental health
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Art therapy
• Physical health
• Self-expression
• Art and health

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Home — Essay Samples — Science — Humanities — Role of Art and Humanities Today

Role of Art and Humanities Today

• Categories: Art History Humanities

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Words: 421 |

Published: Aug 30, 2022

Words: 421 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Works Cited

• Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for profit: Why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton University Press.
• Sontag, S. (1966). Against interpretation and other essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Barthes, R. (1977). Image, music, text. Hill and Wang.
• Eagleton, T. (2000). The idea of culture. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Fry, R. (2010). Why art? Yale University Press.
• Gadamer, H. G. (2004). Truth and method. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Elkins, J. (2003). Visual studies: A skeptical introduction. Routledge.
• Anderson, W. R. (1998). The truth about the truth: De-confusing and re-constructing the postmodern world. TarcherPerigee.
• Kwon, M. (2004). One place after another: Site-specific art and locational identity. MIT Press.
• Danto, A. C. (1981). The transfiguration of the commonplace: A philosophy of art. Harvard University Press.

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• Art And Culture
• Holly Daffurn
• September 18, 2020

Times have changed: the evolving role of an artist

The role of an artist

What is the role of an artist? There is no denying that art from a given time in history or a distinct geographical location can offer  insights into a culture that we would otherwise have no knowledge of. But sometimes art tells us more about the artist than the society and culture that surrounds them. At times, art feels like it reflects the very core of humanity. Other times it is purely aesthetic, a luxury, a rare indulgence. Art can portray the rich complex beauty of the natural world, it can also make bold, ugly, raw statements that are unsettling, challenging and far from beautiful.

With all of these vastly different sparks of inspiration, what is the role of an artist? Is the role of an artist who seeks beauty and an aesthetic end result any different than that of one who looks to make a statement of political or intellectual value?

Art has had many different purposes throughout history. How has the role of the modern day artist changed?

The changing role of an artist throughout history

It is clear that artists have many different roles, but no matter what medium they use or style they explore, they all share the same purpose: to create art. Art that is beautiful, art that is political, art that is accessible, art that challenges, art that is expressive, art that is cryptic.

The very basic idea is that artists reflect themselves and their surroundings. This could be factual and realistic or surreal, symbolic and expressive. From the days when cave walls were daubed with rich mud to show animals and primitive people, artists have used their medium to show things to others. You could say that the role of the artists is in part to describe life, but also to shed light on aspects that may otherwise be missed.

When you consider the work of Albrecht Dürer, you will recall the fine detail and technical accuracy that he exhibited. This sense of realism was common in art until Cubism and the avant-garde movements came into play, bringing with them a fashion for conceptual, stylised and cerebral work. Different art movements have not only caused the style of art to evolve, but have also caused a shift in the role of the artist.

Anonymous artisans

In the Ancient World , the classical artist was actually a labourer. Painters, sculptors and craftsman were labelled as artisans. They would take over the trade from their father—meaning art professions were not a choice but an inheritance. Artisans practised technical excellence, but there was no formal training and artistic expression was not encouraged.

In the Middles Ages , artists would learn their skill through the apprenticeship system. Most art was anonymous and was produced by people considered to be craftsmen rather than artists. During this time, the art profession advanced the most. In Medieval Europe, master craftsmen were recognised as honourable and responsible members of society.

Recognized Renaissance

The Renaissance was the time when artists were recognised for their work, it signified the end to anonymous work. Thanks to Giorgio Vasari and his infamous book The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects , artists (especially Florentines) started to gain a bit more recognition and respect. Merchants started to use art to express power and wealth.

During this time, art was seen as an indulgence and a luxury. Poets, philosophers, scholars and mathematicians were held in high regard, they were seen as intellectuals and were much cleaner than artists. Artists were anxious to be given the same level of respect as these revered members of society. They started to include more complex themes within their work, adding details that would not be recognised by the untrained or untutored eye. Platonic ideals, scientific theories and astrological details started to occur in Renaissance artwork, changing the role of the artist significantly and paving the way for art as it is seen today, as a means of expression on an emotional, intellectual and even political level.

Persuasive art

The Baroque court artist was employed to give a country a sense of persona. It was also used to influence what people wore and how they behaved. In this regard, it was the earliest form of art as marketing. The role of the court artist was one of promotion and advertisement.

By the turn of the 20 th century, society artists were painting highly complimentary portraits that portrayed wealth, beauty and good taste. The artist’s role was to beautify the subject of each painting, making them appear more attractive, thinner, paler and more beautiful. These artists were making society seem more appealing, as well as beautifying individuals in a similar manner as Hollywood and the paparazzi do to this day.

Political and societal change through revolutionary art

When art was made by people who were considered to be artisans, it was very much seen as a job with no room for expression or individuality. Artisans experienced little freedom, and the role was controlled by those in power. When the Renaissance introduced the idea of using art as an expression of independent thought, the first seeds of revolutionary art was shown.

Throughout time, artists have realised that art can play a significant role in shaping history. They have let go of the idea of descriptive art and found a more profound meaning. Revolutionary artists have seen the potential in using art as a form of social progress.

Revolutionary artists such as Diego Rivera and Kathe Kollwitz used their work to literally illustrate revolutionary dogma. Artists such as Goya, Daumier and Munch simply portrayed society in such bleak and disturbing conditions that they made people think about social change. Other artists have been considered revolutionary for their abilities to think outside the box and try new, brave techniques and expressive styles. Their work is not necessarily political or offering social commentary, but it does offer an insight into the times. Artists in this category include Matisse, Manet, Picasso and Cezanne.

Art for art’s sake

Bohemian artists follow a nonconformist lifestyle and abandon structure and convention in favour of art. Bohemians are also enchanted by the discoveries of the Romantics. They believe that emotions are the ultimate truth, there is no distinction between art and life, and they focus on individual expression and the intuition of creativity. Bohemians and Romantics believe in art for art’s sake; art forms the crux of their life, and it’s as important and integral as religion can be for some people.

If revolutionary artists are political radicals, then Bohemian artists are social radicals. They focus on changing how people think, by accessing their emotions. The emotional impact of their art is strong and of great importance. The role of the Bohemian artist also often includes contempt for the middle classes, an element of self-destruction, and a belief that an artist must suffer. The protest against society and conformity often does not take an artistic form, but more of a behavioural one.

The modern-day role of an artist

The modern artist can take on any of those roles, or perhaps even an amalgamation of them all. Many artists have elements of the artisan or society painter in their professional life, producing aesthetic commissions based on the orders of those who pay them. They may also use art to express their own political or emotional landscapes. It is common nowadays for artists to have a number of roles to fulfil different aspects of their lives. Art to make money, art to gain recognition, art to make a statement, art as a form of therapy, art as an emotional release. Nowadays illustrators, graphic designers and industrial designers have taken the place of the artisans of the past.

Perhaps you can recognise several of these roles within your own work. Art can be an escape from reality, used as a chronicle of the times, or be something we all can relate to. It can be a catalyst for change, be instinctive, feed our culture, reflect nature, soothe the soul. It can be an absolute indulgence and luxury, it can be anything you want it to be. The role of an artist is as mercurial as the artists inspiration and ideas, it changes constantly, evolving as the years churn by and adapting with the same frenetic pace as society.

Further reading

• True blue: a brief history of the colour blue in art
• Seeing red: a brief history of the colour red in art

Related posts:

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The essence and significance of art.

By EDEN Gallery ,

Posted Mar 01, 2022 ,

In Art Blog, Eduardo Kobra

Art is a multifaceted phenomenon, serving as a reflection of our innermost emotions and the world around us. It evokes feelings, from joy and sorrow to anger, creating a bridge of understanding between diverse groups of people. By transcending languages and cultures, art becomes an invaluable asset in fostering unity and peace.

Art is not just an expression of emotion but also a medium for communicating ideas. It can act as therapeutic relief, a conduit for self-expression, or simply a way to appreciate life's beauty. Through art, we can chronicle history, embody societal values, and comment on political or social events.

The Core Seven: Why Art Matters

The realm of art is vast, and its significance has evolved over time. However, there are seven primary reasons why art has remained indispensable to humanity:

• Escape from Reality : Art offers a haven from the every day, allowing us to step into different worlds and perspectives.
• Fostering Community : It establishes a shared identity and sense of belonging among diverse groups.
• Self-Expression and Awareness : Art provides a platform to voice our feelings, thoughts, and identities.
• Contemplation and Reflection : Through art, we can introspect and ponder life's mysteries.
• Entertainment and Joy : Beyond its deeper meanings, art can also be sheer fun and enjoyment.
• Eliciting Strong Reactions : Art has the power to inspire awe, wonder, and introspection.

The Intrinsic Value of Art

While art's monetary worth can be significant, its true value lies in its creation. The emotions, skills, and creativity poured into each piece are what makes it invaluable. Artists aim to leave a lasting impact, ensuring their creations resonate and endure. Furthermore, art serves as a cultural ambassador, educating us about diverse lifestyles and histories.

The Role and Debate Surrounding Art

The purpose of art has been debated for ages. While some view it solely as a form of entertainment, others see it as a vital part of human existence. Art stands out from mere design or craft because it isn't bound by functionality. It offers a unique means of expression, allowing us to convey complex emotions and ideas that words might fail to capture. Historically, art has manifested in various forms, from paintings and sculptures to literature, each playing a pivotal role in shaping civilizations.

Art's Transformative Power

Art possesses the unparalleled ability to alter perceptions and catalyze change. For instance, in ancient Greece, art and music were deemed the only channels to communicate with the gods, emphasizing their immense cultural significance. Over the decades, artists have mirrored society's evolution, challenges, and aspirations, as seen in movements like Dadaism, Surrealism, and Pop Art.

In Conclusion

Art is not just a creative endeavor; it's a force that shapes, influences and reflects society. As you've gleaned from this exploration, art's essence lies in its myriad roles and impacts on daily life. If you're keen to delve deeper into contemporary art, consider visiting EDEN Gallery. With locations in major cities and a robust online presence, EDEN Gallery showcases exceptional contemporary artists. Every artwork is original and comes with a certificate of authenticity, ensuring a trusted and enriching art-buying experience.

Contact for More Information Availability and Price

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Childhood, with its boundless energy and vivid imagination, has long been a profound source of inspiration in the world of art. From the innocent charm of a child's gaze to the playful spirit captured in their activities, artists have continually sought to explore and celebrate the essence of youth. To read more, click here.

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Guest Essay

America Got Gay Marriage, but It Came at a Cost

By Omar G. Encarnación

Mr. Encarnación is the author of the forthcoming book “Framing Equality: The Politics of Gay Marriage Wars.”

It’s a strange time for gay rights in America. As the country nears the 10th anniversary of the legalization of gay marriage nationwide, support for it has risen to 70 percent of the American public. But at the same time, L.G.B.T.Q. people are being targeted in ways not seen since the days of Save Our Children , Anita Bryant’s infamous 1977 campaign against gay rights that depicted gay men as human garbage and pedophiles.

In recent years, Republican-controlled state legislatures have banned drag shows, gender-affirming care for minors and adults , and the teaching of sexual orientation from kindergarten through the third grade, including the passage of Florida’s “ Don’t Say Gay” law . Panic about “ grooming ,” a homophobic slur that exploits people’s worst fears about gay people and children, is having a moment .

Even Obergefell v. Hodges , the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage nationally, is under attack. In 2020, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas cast doubt on the legality of the ruling, which could yet go the same way as Roe v. Wade. The Respect for Marriage Act , passed by Congress in 2022, did not codify the ruling into law and would provide scant protection.

Clearly, marriage equality was not enough to bring full equality to L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. It would be wishful to think it could, perhaps. But the gay marriage campaign was a major missed opportunity to expand L.G.B.T.Q. equality. When compared with its foreign counterparts, the American campaign was notable for one thing: the extraordinary modesty of its framing.

The approach was good enough to make gay marriage the law of the land. Yet by failing to make a more ambitious case for equality across the board, as other countries did, the campaign limited the transformative power of gay marriage and created an opening for today’s backlash.

Inspired by the civil rights movement’s struggle for equality under the law, the campaign — which ran for roughly two decades until the ruling in 2015 — was framed around rights and benefits. It spotlighted the rights denied to same-sex couples, including tax deductions, inheritance provisions and hospital visitation privileges.

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Embracing the future of AI in the food industry

February 2, 2024

The food industry, a sector perpetually grappling with dynamic consumer demands, variable crop yields, and pressing sustainability issues, finds a potent ally in artificial intelligence (AI). As AI in the food industry weaves its way into various facets of production, from precision farming to quality control, it offers a beacon of efficiency and safety. This pivotal integration is not merely about technology; it's about reshaping the foundations of food manufacturing and product development, making way for a future where innovation meets sustainability.

AI's influence extends beyond mere production processes. It's changing how new food products are conceived, designed, and brought to market. Through AI-driven predictive analytics and machine learning, companies can now align closer than ever with consumer preferences, drastically reducing the trial-and-error of product development.

This synergy of technology and culinary science unlocks new possibilities in ingredient discovery, pushing the boundaries of what's achievable in taste, nutrition, and ecological impact. As we embark on this journey of AI in the food industry, we witness a sector transforming itself, ready to cater to a world that demands smarter, more sustainable food solutions.

AI in food production: A new frontier in efficiency and sustainability

The food industry is constantly challenged by shifting consumer demands, fluctuating crop yields, subpar safety standards, and an alarming level of food waste. In the United States alone, a staggering 30% of all food and drink is discarded annually, translating into a loss of approximately $48.3 billion in revenue . This is where AI steps in, offering a transformative solution. By utilizing AI in the food industry, we can significantly mitigate these issues, particularly in reducing food waste through more efficient practices.

AI's role in food production is pivotal, marking a shift towards more intelligent and sustainable practices. Advanced predictive analytics , driven by AI, enable accurate forecasting of weather patterns, enhancing crop resilience and yield. AI systems can analyze vast amounts of data to detect early signs of disease and pest infestation , allowing for timely and targeted interventions. Furthermore, AI-driven monitoring of soil and nutrient levels leads to optimized fertilizer usage, contributing to healthier crops and reduced resource expenditure.

The application of AI in food manufacturing also promises enhanced efficiency and safety. Automated AI-driven inspection systems are revolutionizing quality control processes. By employing predictive analytics, these systems can preemptively identify contamination risks and optimize supply chain management. AI machine vision systems are adept at scrutinizing product quality, ensuring only the highest standard goods reach consumers.

The outcome of incorporating AI in food production can lead to significant waste reduction, safer food products, and an overall boost in industry profits. By embracing AI, the food industry can advance towards a more sustainable and profitable future.

AI-driven innovation: Crafting the future of food products

The stark reality in the food industry is that around 80% of new product launches fall short , primarily due to consumer disinterest. However, AI is changing this narrative. Data scientists are now harnessing AI for predictive analytics , offering a deeper understanding of consumer preferences and trends. This approach significantly enhances personalization, elevating consumer satisfaction and success rates in product launches.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of food technology, the need to embrace emerging technologies has never been greater. Leading companies in the food sector are pioneering AI use, showcasing its versatility and transformative impact. From expediting product prototyping to mastering the precision formulation of plant-based alternatives, these examples underline the expansive potential of AI in redefining product development.

As we observe the remarkable strides made by Nestlé , Vivi Kola, and Climax Foods Inc ., it becomes evident that AI in the food industry is not only a tool but also a catalyst for innovation. These efforts demonstrate how AI can transform ideas into reality, reshape market trends, and create products that resonate with evolving consumer needs. The success of these initiatives serves as a testament to AI's potential to restructure food product development.

AI-powered ingenuity: Redefining ingredient discovery in food manufacturing

AI is proving to be more than a technological advancement; it's a game-changer in ingredient innovation. The traditional approach to ingredient discovery, often slow and resource-intensive, is being transformed by AI's capability to rapidly identify and develop new, sustainable ingredients.

Brightseed's Forager exemplifies this transformation. This AI-driven computational platform is transforming how we understand plant-based bioactives. Its machine learning algorithms don't just analyze the molecular composition of plants; they also uncover potential health benefits, paving the way for creating unique and beneficial ingredients.

For The Not Company, creating their AI platform known as ‘Giuseppe’ has helped them quickly develop their plant-based alternative products. Giuseppe parses information about the composition, taste, texture, and appearance of animal products and produces a number of plant-based recipes to recreate the same experiences. These recipes are then tested, and review information is fed back to Giuseppe, allowing the platform to learn and become more accurate with each product it develops.

When The Not Company developed its first product, NotMayo , the process took 10 months. Since then, Giuseppe has increased efficiency for every subsequent product, with NotChicken taking only 2 months. By using available AI technology, companies can rapidly increase their efficiency, reduce their development costs, and quickly get the best products into the hands of their discerning consumers.

By harnessing AI in ingredient innovation, food scientists are not just creating new products; they're reshaping the landscape of food manufacturing. This technological leap grants them a competitive edge, allowing for quicker market introductions of sustainable and innovative ingredients. The potential of AI in the food industry is boundless, offering exciting prospects in R&D efficiency, new revenue streams, and a revolution in the food industry.

Shaping the future of AI in the food industry

As we stand on the cusp of a new era in the food industry, the integration of AI emerges as a pivotal force in redefining its future. Companies that strategically embrace AI are not merely adapting but forging a path toward unparalleled success and sustainability. The choice is clear: evolve with AI and lead the change or risk falling behind in a rapidly progressing world.

In an industry characterized by relentless change and diverse consumer expectations, AI is the cornerstone for innovation and safety in food production and manufacturing. The leaders and visionaries of the food industry who welcome AI are not just adopting technology but championing a movement towards smarter, more sustainable food solutions.

The journey with AI in the food sector is one of both discovery and triumph. With each step forward, we unlock new potentials in efficiency, creativity, and growth, marking a transformative chapter in the history of food technology.

Join the AI food revolution today with CAS Custom Services SM , where our expert scientists and AI-driven solutions are ready to elevate your unique food industry challenges.

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Election latest: Sunak responds to Starmer's stance on family time - as Johnson returns to Westminster

Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are beginning a frantic final few days of campaigning before the polls open on Thursday. Listen to a special election-centric Sky News Daily podcast as you scroll.

Monday 1 July 2024 19:53, UK

• General Election 2024

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Election week

• Politics Hub With Sophy Ridge is live - watch above
• Minister predicts election defeat

Farage 'cannot be welcomed' into Tory party

• PM 'not concerned' about postal ballot delays
• Starmer wants to keep Friday nights for family time
• Explained: Why 'supermajority' warnings don't add up
• Sky News Daily: Five things main parties aren't talking about
• Live reporting by Tim Baker   and Bhvishya Patel

Expert analysis

• Rob Powell: PM's talking like Labour's already won
• Ed Conway: The science and security of the exit poll
• Matthew Thompson: What's a good result for the Lib Dems?

Election essentials

• Manifesto pledges: Conservatives | Greens | Labour | Lib Dems | Plaid | Reform | SNP
• Trackers:  Who's leading polls? | Is PM keeping promises?
• Campaign Heritage:  Memorable moments from elections gone by
• Follow Sky's politics podcasts:  Electoral Dysfunction | Politics At Jack And Sam's
• Read more:  Who is standing down? | Key seats to watch | What counts as voter ID? | Check if your constituency is changing | Guide to election lingo
• How to watch election on Sky News

Sophy Ridge is now asking the panel about concerns about people who want to vote not being able to and some being disenfranchised.

Harriet Harman, former Labour deputy leader, says Rishi Sunak should not have called the election and "he probably didn't think about it".

She says across the country "at least pone in five people are voting by post" so the ones that have already been sent will now be "piling up in the councils".

"The electoral returning officers call in the agents of each candidate and they open them before Thursday.

"The agents are there to make sure it's all proper and everything is in order."

She goes on to say all around the country now there are agents who are seeing the votes and seeing the results right now.

"They are not the final result but word starts seeping out about what has been seen by those agents," she adds.

Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker has explained why he wants to have a run at the leadership of the Conservative Party - after the election he believes the Tories will lose.

Mr Baker says he does not want to pre-empt Rishi Sunak standing down, but says he does want to run to replace him.

Asked to explain why, he says: "The reality is that my colleagues have sent for me before the referendum, after the referendum, during COVID and over net zero. 

"And on all four occasions, I've led actual MPs to a great degree of success - and I wouldn't mind the chance to do it again." 

He adds: "I've got 30 years of leadership experience in the armed forces, in the private sector, in parliament and in government."

Pointing to his time as Northern Ireland minister and Brexit minister, he claims people "can see my record is one of success".

Asked about lessons that will need to be learned for the Tories in the future, Steve Baker says the first thing that that needs to be done is "we need to earn trust".

The cabinet minister says "that's going to require the party to internalise debates which otherwise have spilled out into the public domain". 

He says "our party's going to mourn loss" and will need to "earn the right to be heard" again by the public, before setting out a "really coherent programme for government".

Asked if there is any space for Nigel Farage in the party after the election, he says he has been "clear" about this.

"A person who has deliberately set out to destroy the Conservative Party cannot subsequently be welcomed into it," he says.

"That is what he set out to do with Richard Tice."

"Unfortunately, his party attracts a number of people who I would absolutely not allow in the Conservative Party," he adds, referring to Reform candidates who've been dropped after making racist comments.

"Nigel can't have it both ways. If he wants to be a Conservative, he should shut down his party and join ours."

Northern Ireland Secretary Steve Baker appears to have conceded the election to the Labour Party.

Speaking to Sophy Ridge , Mr Baker says "we all accept that the danger now is a Labour supermajority".

He says the Tories would "love to win", but people would "guffaw" if he said a Conservative victory was possible with the current state of the polling.

Mr Baker then says what is important is for there to be as many opposition MPs as possible to hold Labour to account.

"If Keir Starmer has a majority of 250 he'll have practically untrammelled power," he says.

Tory campaign has been 'embarrassing'

The minister says Labour has not figured in the difficulty of running a country in an era with WhatsApp.

Mr Baker helped foment backbench rebellions against his own prime minister during Brexit.

He warns Labour will descend into "Kremlinology" around which faction of the party is going where.

But Mr Baker admits "elements" of the Conservative Party's campaign have been "embarrassing".

"Certainly nobody with inside knowledge should be placing a bet," the minister says, and he also points to the D-Day fiasco.

Jonathan Reynolds is asked why Sir Keir Starmer's approval ratings are so low given Labour look on course to win the election, to which he replies: "I think people are cynical."

"I think they too often have seen such poor government," he says.

"They have stopped believing politics can make things any better. I think that reflects on all political leaders. 

"But I know from what Sir Keir has achieved as leader of the opposition, that if he's anywhere near as successful, if he becomes prime minister, I think people will recognise that a great deal. 

"And I know him personally, and I know he has the skills and attributes required to be a very good prime minister."

He also says Labour changed in response to the 2019 defeat, and it's Sir Keir's leadership "that has directly contributed to Labour being in a position to contest this election". 

Labour's shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds is speaking to  Sophy Ridge  tonight.

The first question he is asked about is Sir Keir Starmer's commitment to finishing work at 6pm on Fridays so he can spend time with his teenage children, something he's said he hopes he can continue if he becomes PM.

Mr Reynolds says anyone who has worked with Sir Keir can "testify to his professionalism, to his ferocious work ethic".

He adds Sir Keir is always "on it" and "always prepared".

More Cameron or Brown?

Asked if Sir Keir was going to be more "chillaxing David Cameron" than "Gordon Brown with his red box in the early hours of the morning", Mr Reynolds says the Labour leader has "professionalism and work ethic in everything that he does".

Mr Reynolds says his leader is putting the point across that he will "still be a dad" - something he thinks is important.

We're here: it's election week. 

On Thursday you'll have a chance to vote - and on Friday either Rishi Sunak or… let's be honest, almost certainly Keir Starmer… will travel to see the King and ask to form the next government. 

It's felt like a long campaign, and at times a very surreal one.

But it's nearly over and really, at this point, the chance to change most voters minds en masse has passed. 

The debates are done, the manifestos are out, the postal votes are already pouring in - now it's about who can get their vote out when it really matters on Thursday.

And then, very simply, it's time to let democracy take its course. 

 It's going to be a historic week. 

Our weeknight politics show  Politics Hub With Sophy Ridge  is live now on Sky News.

The fast-paced programme dissects the inner workings of Westminster, with interviews, insights, and analysis - bringing you, the audience, into the corridors of power.

Sophy is joined tonight by the Labour shadow business secretary  Jonathan Reynolds  and the Northern Ireland minister  Steve Baker , who's teased a bid to replace Rishi Sunak if the Tories lose the election.

On Sophy's panel tonight are:

• Harriet Harman , former Labour deputy leader;
• Kate Fall , Tory peer and David Cameron's ex-chief of staff.

Watch live on Sky News, in the stream at the top of this page, and follow live updates here in the Politics Hub.

Watch  Politics Hub With Sophy Ridge  from Monday to Thursday on Sky channel 501, Virgin channel 602, Freeview channel 233, on the  Sky News website  and  app  or on  YouTube .

Two leaders who have previously enjoyed great popularity, now under enormous pressure and potentially facing up to losing their jobs by the time summer's over.

The parallels between Rishi Sunak and Gareth Southgate were being made repeatedly on Sunday, as the latter stared down the barrel of a shock defeat for England at the Euros.

But a dramatic comeback saw the Three Lions beat Slovakia to stay in the tournament for the quarter-finals… and Mr Sunak has been channelling that spirit today, declaring: "It's not over until it's over." 

Questioned about the similarities between himself and embattled England manager Southgate, Mr Sunak said: "His and I are the jobs everyone thinks they could probably do it better, and has a view.

"But I think when it comes to those things, and the criticism, which of course is par for the course, it's easy to deal with when you have a conviction in what you believe – and I do."

'It's not over til it's over'

They face Switzerland in the last eight this weekend after goals from Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham saw off Slovakia on Sunday, and Southgate has not ruled out staying beyond the tournament.

Asked if he could overturn the odds of a looming defeat with a moment rivalling the stunning overhead kick scored by Bellingham, the PM opted instead for a cricket metaphor.

He told the BBC: "Mine is probably more a kind of flashy, cover drive or off-drive, or something instead, but there we go.

"Look, it is not over till it's over."

Boris Johnson has been spotted back on the streets of Westminster.

The former PM was filmed by Sky News heading into an office block near the Houses of Parliament.

He remained tight-lipped about what he has been up to during the campaign.

Mr Johnson has been sharing videos endorsing some - but not all - Conservative candidates, though he's also been on holiday.

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