key: cord-0978335-z9jvolhc
authors: Rivas, Virgilio A
title: The world's future: A question of art and health
date: 2021-11-23
journal: J Public Health (Oxf)
DOI: 10.1093/pubmed/fdab389
sha: d70a176a28ffc8371eaca0d72dc27de3bb3150c1
doc_id: 978335
cord_uid: z9jvolhc

Art has shown its resilient nature throughout prehistoric and modern human history, from extreme climate challenges to worsening microbial threats against species’ health. From the cave paintings scattered across three continents, Europe, Latin America and Asia, to the digitization of culture that characterizes the modern creative industry, art has continued to remind us that existential risks are better addressed through co-habitational thinking/caring. This short essay makes a case for art resilience amid the pandemic that has shown no sign of surrendering to human intervention as planetary multispecies life braces for a more precarious climate emergency in years to come.

How is art related to the health of the world? COVID-19 can give this question its timely and proper context. Somehow, we are forced to reflect on this question at an inauspicious time for the human species to exist in the face of two significant existential and health risks: the microbial and the climate. The impulse to inquire about these threats is, however, nothing new in human history. It is as old as art itself.

In the early phase of the pandemic, work shutdown had created spare time for many people. Some discovered their keenness for art activities while the pandemic forced them to become perceptive like never before of what is going on around them. 1 With the onset of COVID-19, these barely implicit, unspoken realities, often sidelined by the vagaries of everyday existence back in pre-pandemic days, become more exposed to attentional captures by human activities, suddenly losing their usual outgoing socialization speed, energy and momentum. In pre-COVID-19 days, attentional activities that make way for self-reflection, even self-care, were a far cry from the pandemic gloom that ironically now makes people explore the reflective art of self-attention and co-habitational forms of thinking and caring. 2 When it comes to testing this attentional formation, as life's circumstances constantly challenge its importance to our mental well-being, 3 the case of absurdist literature, for instance, and its effects on critical thinking skills, perception and memory recall a familiar example.

In a 2009 study, for instance, where a team of psychologists concluded that reading Kafka's story, particularly 'The Country Doctor', enabled participants to find a recognizable pattern in a somewhat confusing narrative, art takes health to a different level. 4 Kafka's story is an absurd tale: attempts at meaningful resolutions to life's challenges are thwarted by perfectly baked circumstances that upset, even pervert, normal expectations. The research participants were treated to two different versions of 'The Country Doctor', one that actually makes sense (changing the story's plot) and the other the usual Kafkaesque default lack of meaning and purpose. Those treated with the original Kafkaesque version, instead of accepting its absurdist end as in the first narrative rendering, were more inclined to seek hidden patterns to make the story intelligible. 5 The pandemic qualifies as a 'meaning threat' in this sense of Kafka's tale. The ability to discover hidden and tacit ontological patterns that make sense of an environment gone awry is one way of creating or re-creating a world that finally 'means' something. Art justifies a world of its making by projecting a sense of unity onto it, symmetry and harmony to regain control of it and subsequently of oneself, facing uncertainty. Some thinkers in the past identified this worldmaking capability with the judgment of beauty. 6 But then, the pandemic happened. The challenges to artistic sensibility in the sense we discussed had never been at their darkest, the opposite of everything touched by beauty. Beauty leads existence to an enlightened path, arguably, a state of human flourishing, what the Greeks called eudaemonia, with the essential health-wise indices of a secure life, whether intellectually, physically and spiritually. The pandemic shatters this ideal of art. With the continuing mutations of the virus, COVID-19 ushers in a spell of permanent existential insecurity.

But, other than this individual openness to the absurd and the ability to redeem existence from it, there is another dimension to art that plays into the vagaries of the health crisis as the pandemic rages on. Here, I refer to the art world structured by a professional industry that organizes public sensibility and taste into the social necessity of humanizing bodily natures and senses. The art world's proximity to moral and ethical games is, therefore, not an unknown fact. It is no surprise that its internet presence in the attentional activities aimed to absorb the shockwaves of the pandemic offers innovative ways of self-care.

These artistic approaches resonate with collaborative practices of immunology, mutual protection and therapeutic care within a working intersectional democracy of creative sensibilities. Their constitutive effects on sustaining health protocols, such as wearing face masks and observing social distancing regulations, are not difficult to deduce. Art is inherently co-habitational in terms of its orientation toward people, objects, things, natural or artificial. But, likewise, the pandemic puts this world to test due to restrictions on mobility and socialization, which form the lifeblood of an industry-fueled creative industry.

At the heart of the pandemic challenge to the art world is its threat to human security, with bodies from which art practically derives becoming more vulnerable to infection. The challenging prospect of the radical remaking of the human (which at the fundamental level is an organic structure), stemming from the global health crisis, brings the art world and public health in a mutual defensive stance. In this case, we may talk about efforts at art resilience during a health crisis. By its broader implication, this resilience will have to start with recovery and re-normalization of bodily nature, arguably, the centerpiece of art in its living form that follows a means-end trajectory of species survivability.

As the pandemic has shown, art resilience has depended mainly on the internet, providing a getaway and conduit for the professional art world during lockdowns. This year, we have already seen the rapid acceleration of digitization of culture with news of the Louvre placing its entire art collection online and the British Museum offering podcasts and virtual strolls of viewing favorites such as the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon and others. 7 In Asia, the effects of the pandemic on the art industry were mixed: commercial art had seen strong market sales, particularly in Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia, whereas some independent art collectives in the region had been the hardest hit, but still adapting to digital alternatives. 7 Nonetheless, just as much as the pandemic through the internet has 'democratized art' where 'people are no longer restricted by geography, cost or time', 8 it has also exposed the polarities of sense-making to surmount the pandemic difficulties. Art presupposes bodies, their state of health and their porosity to meanings. Despite the virtuality of technological bridging, we can still tell bodies apart, so to speak, based on the actual geography of time and place, social status and economic disparity, not to mention degrees of exposure to geological and climate risks and their global situatedness within a system of planetary clustering (such as North and South). Although art is a common human propensity, it is also a fact that sensibility, which founds art, is differentiated by bodily natures across diverse areas of the human condition and within interlocking webs of modern living now under threat. More than ever, they are permeable to the ups and downs of species' health (especially, poor bodies vulnerable to diseases) due to pressures of time zones, work from home and the new normal arrangements. Add to this the continuing prospect of economic shutdowns that lead to massive lay-offs and soaring poverty statistics. In this sense, health provides art with the usual and new materials for self and collective composition and a creative challenge to recurring structural systems indifferent to public or species' health.

When I said that inquiring about health is as old as art itself, I was reminded of the cave art of prehistoric peoples in France, Spain, Latin America and Southeast Asia. 9 Cave paintings are extant testimonies of how art functioned as a kind of immunological response to external threats, especially climate change. Extreme climate emergencies forced these people deep into their cavernous sanctuary, forging new social, political and cultural pacts, remaking food security systems, and refashioning the world they knew to make sense of an absurd reality they hardly possessed cognitive tools to understand but only had art to ride out the natural course of events. Only during that time, climate threats originated from nature. In the era of the Anthropocene, climate change has become a singular human event. Humanity is causing catastrophes that threaten their very own survival. With increasing microbial risks of contagion resulting from massive disruption of biodiversity that caters to commodity and tech-hungry humanity, saving the planet might be best served by returning to the lessons of resilience as prehistoric peoples conceived and practiced their art.

Here, think of the cave as a planet. Isolate this correlational image from the prevailing system correlation of today's cybernetics and organic life. In these juxtaposed correlations, it not difficult to see that the cave lacks today's technological advantage. Arguably, however, a cybernetic planet lacks the artistic resilience of prehistory. Both are time-bound indicators of the conflict of the faculties, with survivability as their common aim.

Technology uniformizes bodily natures. Art keeps them differentiated to maintain co-habitational forms of existence. Suppose prehistory bequeathed us the resilience of art and the way to co-exist with different ecologies even in the face of insurmountable threats as humanity experiences at present. What then can technology bestow to succeeding generations?

This question is a question of health. Above all, health is the question of the world's future that, time and again, art keeps reminding us amid the planet's technological saturation and its grating obsession with a cybernetic future.

What Can We Learn from the Art of Pandemic Past?' The New York Times Style Magazine

Art in a pandemic: a digital gallery

Public health and the muse

Reading Kafka 'enhances cognitive mechanisms,' claims study

Reading Kafka improves learning, suggests UCSB Psychology Study

Critique of Pure Reason

COVID-19 impact on Southeast Asian art

A world at our fingertips: How COVID-19 accelerated the digitization of culture

A journey to the Oldest Cave Paintings in the world