Consume Some Art- You’ll Feel Better

I felt awful on Friday evening, so I went to the National Gallery. When I left, I no longer felt awful; I felt quite wonderful, actually. I felt so wonderful that I took a detour along the Southbank of the Thames and became convinced that the something had happened to the river, because I had not been so entranced by it when I looked at it yesterday. The pink strip of electric light along Waterloo Bridge was reflecting off the water like luminescent fish scales, and the dancing light made me think of Pissaro’s Boulevard Montmartre at Night which I had just seen for the first time at the gallery. I walk along this riverbank several times a week, but in that moment I had no desire to do anything but sit on a bench and stare at the water for an hour because it looked like a painting. Art can elevate our lives by heightening our abilities to draw associations between things we had not previously considered, illuminating our world into a slightly different light than it had been before. In his Defence of Poetry, Percy Shelly wrote:

But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions … it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.

I had not read a poem, but I had been purged from my inward sight of familiarity and the wonder of my being was revealed! Very fun. I sat on my bench, watching the river and wrote a poem about the lovely lights. Not only had staring at paintings for a few hours altered my perception of my surroundings; it had affected my capacity to produce poetry.

We can think of a creative person like a sponge; they may be squeezed in any number of shapes, but the art which pours out of them will inevitably be the colour of whatever they’ve spent their time absorbing. That is to say, what they consume in the time where they are not producing art. This consumption of creativity is not part of the active creation process but it has a profound effect on whatever you finally produce. In the past decade, however, something quite significant has changed in the way we spend the time in which we aren’t writing, or working, or drawing. It is rectangular, and grows hot in your hand when it is left on charge for too long.

Mindless scrolling is the equivalent of a bad diet for an artist. I wanted to be a rockstar when I was a teenager, and would spend hours scrolling through TikTok edits, getting stoned and watching old performances from the 1970s with tears in my eyes because ‘people aren’t like that anymore’. To some degree I was right, we don’t live in the same social environment which bred rock music into the 20th century, but there was one quite obvious difference between me and the artists that I envied so much: they weren’t sitting with a laptop on their lap every evening and vaguely daydreaming about being anywhere else. I started getting off my phone and just laying on my bed, listening to albums back to back every day I got home from school. The prolonged, focussed sessions of listening to music finally inspired me to try and write some of my own, beginning to cultivate an environment in which I was actively producing art. This was the first time I noticed the effects of ‘passive creation’, and it was an unimaginably liberating revelation. Nothing in our biological makeup is anything different to someone fifty years ago; our brains are just little bruised from the doom scroll. How delightful it is to imagine that there is a thick trunk filled with syrupy potential in all of us, begging to be tapped into. Generation Z just have thicker bark to tap through, built up by billionaires out of inhumanely mined cobalt and short serotonin bursts.

So, if you are ever in despair about the so-called decline of art in the 21st century, make sure you are despairing with your eyes as far away from the direct fire of a screen as possible. But which way should you aim them instead? A book. A painting. A poem that you don’t understand. Or if you are feeling particularly daring, consume nothing. Touch grass, stare at your wall, lay down with your eyes closed and see how long your brain can stand thinking of nothing. We are tapping for creative syrup here; leave the brain rotting to the others.