Art is empathy. No?
Do you agree that art is empathy? Keep reading, then leave a comment to join this dialogue. And don’t forget to check out today’s writing prompt at the bottom of this post. [Ed. from the Archive.]
I’m still thinking about one of the many beautiful and profound lines Fredrik Backman included in My Friends, which is located on page thirteen: Art is empathy.
Thousands of articles and papers and books and poems and symposiums and stories (you name it) have been written about art and what it is over the centuries. But in all the years I have spent studying literature and art in all its various forms and mediums, Backman’s line is one of the only lines I have ever read that has come close to describing what art is, as it captures art’s fundamental essence.
Art is that which connects us to the world, other humans in that world, as well as ourselves and what we contribute to that world and others in it. And how can that happen without true empathy— empathy as a state of seeing, sensing, feeling, connecting, understanding, believing, capturing then revealing?
One can be a technically skilled painter, using all the appropriate brush strokes and color pallets and tools, yet still create paintings that fall flat, that are superficially beautiful but not meaningful to the overall human condition or experience. How? Somehow those paintings lack empathy with their subjects, the world in which they exist, and or the painters themselves. And on some sort of intuitive level, we humans can tell the difference.
One can be a technically skilled poet, using all the appropriate rules for rhyme and meter and form, yet still create poems that fall flat, that are technically executed but not meaningful to the overall human condition or experience. How? Somehow their poems lack empathy with their subject matter, the world and the people in it, and or the poets themselves. And on some sort of intuitive level, we humans can tell the difference.
One can be a technically skilled aesthetician, musician, novelist, art dealer, dancer, art connoisseur, performer, art historian, etc. (You get the gist. Fill in the blank.) and still not be dabbling in art. No?
Looking at and consuming and regurgitating pretty and entertaining things that grab attention for only a brief time does not art make.
One’s ability to see, sense, feel, connect, understand, believe, then capture and reveal the world and the people in it, including themselves, to others, is art, empathetically and emphatically so. No?
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Today’s Writing Prompt
Writing Prompt: “Noooo!”
Write a fictional scene in which someone shouts, "Noooo!"
Or write about the last time you said ‘no’ to someone in real life, and how it made you feel and why.
Writing Tip
Before you start writing, consider: Who shouts this? At whom? Why? Where are they, and why?
