RA Magazine Autumn 2013

Issue Number: 120

Where art and self-help meet

Should art guide, console and exhort its viewers? Richard Cork welcomes a new book that offers a therapeutic vision of art

_{Richard Long RA, 'Waterlines', 1989. © Richard Long/courtesy of Imperial College Healthcare charity art collection.} Impatient with the whole notion of ‘art for art’s sake’, Alain de Botton and John Armstrong have written a wide-ranging rebuttal called Art As Therapy. As their book’s title suggests, they believe ‘art can be a tool’, and we need to focus more clearly on ‘what good it can do for us.’ While recognising that modern civilisation believes increasingly in the importance of art, they emphasise that ‘our encounters with art do not always go as well as they might.’ Despite the record-breaking attendance figures of blockbuster shows, de Botton and Armstrong point out that ‘we are likely to leave highly respected museums and exhibitions feeling underwhelmed, or even bewildered and inadequate.’ The fault lies ‘in the way that art is taught, sold and presented by the art establishment.’ Art in its widest sense should be regarded as ‘a therapeutic medium that can help guide, exhort and console its viewers’, enabling them to become better versions of themselves.

It is a highly optimistic vision and the book discusses how art can help us combat our psychological frailties. The selected artists range from Vermeer and Constable to Johns and Serra, as well as Mies van der Rohe. The book roams widely through subjects as immense as love, nature, money and politics.

Their examination of love is most rewarding, and here the authors are eloquent about Richard Long RA’s lyrical Waterlines, a print which I commissioned in 1989 to be displayed in NHS hospitals. The work focuses on Long’s epic 560-mile walk across Portugal and Spain, pouring water from a bottle along the line he walked each day. The authors ponder Long’s emphasis on ‘the value of patience’ in combating our tendency to ‘lose sight of what we really believe in the tumult of our daily lives’.

• Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, £24.95, Phaidon

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