preventive medicine -- art’s time-release

Take the opioid crisis, so why are people from all walks of life becoming addicted -- so many, in fact, we’ve had to start helping them instead of putting them in jail? I’m going to guess at root it’s boredom, mind-searing, relentless, and unquenchable, driving people to seek any sort of relief. The cause of the affliction is simple enough, people have been looking at too much stuff. There’s no limit for a machine, happily converting heaps of data and never sleeping, but humans have finite capacities and running up close to red line all day takes a toll.

The instinctual response to boredom is to pile on more stimulation, hire a band, install a strobe light, pour hot sauce on the pancakes, but when you’re close to saturation already, cranking it up still more can cause shutdown. Finally all food is bland and ordinary, sex feels like it’s always in rehearsal, and music is just a lot of screaming and banging, maybe you’ve been there. The short-term fix for some has been narcotics, which can effectively cancel boredom temporarily, but they eventually wear off, and a bigger, meaner boredom takes its place. The short-term fix has unfortunate long-term consequences.

Modern art surveys usually begin by asserting that paintings used to be just pictures of things before cameras came along, but there have always been differences. A photo is an impression of reality in a hundredth of a second, but a painting might take a week or more to produce, with every mark, every color, put there by the artist’s hand, the image filtered through their mind and personality. Such enduring objects have an influence merely by their presence in a room, and provide a gentle antidote to the intrusive updating streaming from the ubiquitous device. Paintings slow the mind down, necessarily, because otherwise they can’t be seen at all. As the rest of reality recedes into an endlessly replicating uniformity, unique art objects like paintings become an ever more potent influence on the confidence and well-being, creative thinking, and appreciation of just about everything by the people who see them everyday. Somehow they feel less bored than fellow citizens, they don’t know why.