Review by Choice Review
This volume by de Botton (author, and founder of The School of Life, London) and Armstrong (philosopher/art theorist, Melbourne Univ., Australia) appears to reflect the work of The School of Life, which helps people to be good and to overcome the difficulties inherent in life. The book's theme is that the traditional way of experiencing art can leave one bewildered and unsure as to why the art museum experience fails to have the mysterious effect that it is supposed to have. The authors suggest that art needs a defined purpose: that it should be a tool to help people deal with their psychological frailties or weaknesses. They identify seven functions of art: remembering, hope, sorrow, rebalancing, self-understanding, growth, and appreciation. Further, they advocate that museums should display and describe art differently. Examples would be organizing rooms with themes (such as tenderness) and displaying captions that describe the human emotions that art portrays, rather than historical facts about an artwork. The Agenda for Art that the authors propose could provide a good discussion starter in art history, museum administration, business, and psychology courses. This volume includes many color plates. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above. N. M. Lambert University of South Carolina Upstate
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
WHO'S afraid of Alain de Botton? At 43, he's already an elder in the church of self-help, the master of spinning sugary "secular sermons" out of literature ("How Proust Can Change Your Life"), philosophy ("The Consolations of Philosophy"), architecture ("The Architecture of Happiness"). He has a remarkably guileless face and a friendly, populist vision of art. Why then do I keep checking my pockets? And why the grumbles that he condescends to his subjects and regards his readers, as the British writer Lynn Barber put it, as "ants"? De Botton's new book, "Art as Therapy," written with the historian John Armstrong, begins with grim news. Every day, honest, upright citizens "leave highly respected museums and exhibitions feeling underwhelmed." It's a scandal, especially since the authors firmly believe art exists to make people "better versions of themselves." They dream of a day when art can be prescribed for specific "psychological frailties" (including poor memory and pessimism), when museums can be redesigned as gyms for the psyche, grouping works not by style but by the feelings they depict and the muscles they work. Captions will whisper prompts like: "Don't expect valuable journeys to be easy," for Frederic Edwin Church's painting "The Iceberg." "Art as Therapy" is handsome and depressing. It lays bare the flaws in de Botton's method, chiefly that, well, he does regard his readers like ants. How dispiriting it is to be told that we cannot appreciate mystery, to see complexity cleared away like an errant cobweb. True, perverse, playful reductiveness has always been de Botton's shtick - he's just never done it so badly. The grant proposal prose saps all the fun from the proceedings. What should come across as cheeky sounds unhinged: "The true aspiration of art should be to reduce the need for it"; "We should revisit the idea of censorship, and potentially consider it . . . as a sincere attempt to organize the world for our benefit." Irritatingly, the authors do have a point: there is a hunger to believe art has a pragmatic purpose in our lives (witness the excitement over studies showing that going to museums makes us smarter and reading literary fiction makes us more empathetic). And of course art consoles and nourishes and does everything Armstrong and de Botton say it does. The problem is that we don't need them as middlemen, and we certainly don't need paintings puréed down to pablum and spoon-fed to us. But Armstrong and de Botton think so little of us, they design museums like Temple Grandin designed humane slaughterhouses, to minimize our fear and confusion. And in sparing us the horror of feeling "inadequate," they deprive us of a chance at rapture, to work to possess the work ourselves. (Recall the caption on that painting of the iceberg: "Don't expect valuable journeys to be easy.") I'm reminded of the historian Leo Steinberg's reaction to Jasper Johns's early work, specifically "Drawer," in which a drawer is embedded in a canvas. Steinberg's essay is an elegant, instructive tantrum, the kind of thing one imagines actually entices people to look at pictures. It is modest, frank and very funny on the variety of feelings an interesting image can elicit. Steinberg passes from confusion to contempt to terror ("I am alone with this thing, and it is up to me to evaluate it") to a puzzled sort of pleasure. "It is a kind of self-analysis that a new image can throw you into and for which I am grateful," he writes. "I am left in a state of anxious uncertainty by the painting, about painting, about myself. And I suspect that this is all right." It is, in fact, wonderful. What would Armstrong and de Botton make of "Drawer"? "Open yourself to new experiences," maybe. Worse: "Search within." Pity; the idea of knowledge as a process not a pellet is something that used to matter to de Botton. It's something he has forgotten (and can be forgiven for forgetting; unreliable memory being, after all, the first "frailty" mentioned in "Art as Therapy"). If de Botton were to consult his Proust again, he'd encounter the painter Elstir, whom he treated tenderly in his breakout book, "How Proust Can Change Your Life." Elstir's message is this: "We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us." No one, not even Alain de Botton. PARUL SEHGAL is an editor at the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 15, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
What is art for? The School of Life founder de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life) and University of Melbourne art historian Armstrong (The Intimate Philosophy of Art) propose a profoundly refreshing and heterodox approach to art as a "therapeutic medium" that can help people access "better versions of themselves." Upending the art world's self-referential culture, the book assigns seven functions to art: "Remembering," "Hope," "Sorrow," "Rebalancing," "Self-Understanding," "Growth," and "Appreciation." The most novel moments come from lessons the authors glean from an eclectic range of works. Manet's reflections on the mundane in the painting, Bunch of Asparagus, can instruct us to "re-evaluate and re-desire our partners." A brooding sculpture by Richard Serra teaches us about dignity and the honor of sorrow. The authors formulate an intellectual framework for artists-one that includes the conflicts and virtues of love, for example-to give art an educational goal. However, such an agenda clearly favors one-dimensionality over the complex or ambiguous. Related themes tackled here include money and politics, with the authors arguing for "enlightened investment." Scarcely convincing, though, is the case for progovernment censorship. Nevertheless, the proposal that art dealers function as therapists, that museums be organized into galleries of suffering and compassion, and that scholars "analyze how art could help with a broken heart" boldly positions art at the center of our daily lives. 150 color illus. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In spite of its handsome design and rich illustrations, this title is not a conventional coffee-table art book. Rather than a monograph of a significant artist or overview of a stylistic movement, it is a survey of an expansive swath of Western art history, from the Renaissance to the present. Armstrong and de Botton, who founded the School of Life, a multinational organization dedicated to the dissemination of good ideas, make a polemical argument that art is, at its essence, a therapeutic tool offering viewers the opportunity for self-realization and transformation. The authors propose that we put aside such dry academic questions as historical context and instead ask how artworks can help us solve the most vexing questions in life: What is there to be proud of? What should we become? Some may be surprised by the sweeping and prescriptive nature of de Botton and Armstrong's conclusions. They claim, for instance, that the appreciation of beauty in good art allows us to recognize the unsightliness of much modern architecture and thus the need for aesthetic censorship. VERDICT While many scholars will dismiss this title as an ahistorical attempt to join the genres of art criticism and self-help, casual art museumgoers may find much to contemplate.-Jonathan -Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
