Picture your favorite movie, book, or song. How would your life be different if it had never existed?
From movies to music and more, the arts play a large role in all of our lives. Unfortunately, it can often feel like the arts are in decline, with a steady decrease in funding for arts education in schools across the country.
The arts are vital for both individuals and society as a whole. In this article, we’ll examine the numerous ways that arts are important. Engaging in artistic endeavors can boost your health both mentally and physically, plus it has a wide range of benefits for communities, too.
Read on to learn all about the importance of art:
The Personal Benefits of Art
Creating art has a wealth of mental, emotional, and physical benefits. Your art doesn’t need to sell for millions or hang in fancy galleries to be worthwhile. Here’s a look at the importance of art for individuals:
Allows for Self-Expression
We all play roles throughout the day, such as that of a parent, employee, and so on. Sometimes it can feel like our real self is bottled up inside without a chance to speak. Art allows for healthy self-expression.
Creating art just for yourself allows you to process whatever emotions you currently have inside. Paint a picture of a scary monster. Sing a silly song. Whatever you’re feeling, art gives you space and opportunity to express it.
Helps You Learn Not to Judge
Many people don’t even attempt to create art because they feel they’re not “good enough.” Fortunately, you don’t have to be an excellent artist to benefit from the creation process. Learning an artistic skill requires practice and patience – and those skills transfer to other areas in your life.
Refrain from judging yourself as you draw, sing, etc. As you improve, you’ll find yourself laughing at your mistakes. Even better, with art, sometimes mistakes aren’t mistakes at all. Instead, supposed “errors” lead to flashes of creative insight.
Increases Creativity
A visual arts study found that creating art benefits your mental health by increasing your ability to adapt to adverse situations in all aspects of life. Engaging in a complex, mentally-stimulating task such as painting or drawing has two distinct effects on your brain:
- It creates new connections between brain cells
- It increases communication between the brain’s right and left hemispheres
- Art rewires your brain for the better.
Helps You Stay in the Present Moment
Art allows you to enter a mental state similar to meditation. As you become enthralled in a project, you can lose all sense of time. Your inner dialogue quiets down, and you become aware only of the present moment.
If you have difficulty meditating, try to ease into calmness by drawing or painting. Additionally, make sure you have no ultimate stopping point in mind for your activity. Give yourself time to allow your mind to completely settle as you work.
Increases Intuition
There’s no wrong way to draw or paint. As you move the brush or pencil across the page, pay attention to your feelings. Creating in this manner allows you to tap into your intuition. The more you listen to your intuition, the sharper it becomes.
Listening to your intuition is a skill that carries over into multiple other aspects of life, such as your relationships and career. Learning to trust your gut helps improve your self-confidence and increases your ability to make decisions.
Allows You to Recharge
If you live a hectic life — and who doesn’t? — art might seem like a fun activity, but not one you have time to do. However, you should always make some time for art each week. Art allows you to recharge mentally and emotionally.
When you feel mentally refreshed, life is easier to handle. You’ll feel more energetic, creative, and friendly. Taking time for art isn’t a waste of time; it helps you manage your time more effectively.
Fosters Feelings of Unity
We all want to feel connected to the larger world, and art helps us do that. When you pick up a pencil and create a drawing, you have something in common with everyone else who has ever done the same.
Almost every culture, religion, and type of people have embraced art. It’s a universal language. You don’t have to speak the same dialect or even share the same culture to appreciate a catchy song or beautiful painting. When you create art on your own, you tap into this connected humanity.
Increases Your Powers of Observation
Arts increase your awareness of details and the surrounding environment. For example, after listening to your favorite song for a while, you’ll eventually hear every note and lyric.
The visual arts are perhaps the best for increasing your observational abilities. Leonardo da Vinci once said that painting “embraces all the ten functions of the eye.” These functions are:
- Darkness and light
- Body and color
- Shape and location
- Distance and closeness
- Motion and rest
- Increased problem-solving skills
Nothing inspires creative thinking quite like staring at a blank page. Regularly creating helps promote open-ended thinking and problem-solving. These skills can easily carry over to other aspects of your life, such as work.
Helps Recover from Trauma
An increasing body of evidence shows that art helps people recover from traumatic events such as war and crime. New York Times reporter Terry Sullivan details his experiences using art to help recover from his experience involving a mass shooting on a train.
Psychologists have four recommendations when using art as therapy for treating trauma and PTSD:
1. Choose a medium you’re comfortable using.
Writing about trauma is the most common form of art therapy because just about everyone can write, at least at a basic level. However, painting and drawing are also popular.
There’s no wrong medium to use. If you love to dance and feel comfortable doing so, you can create a dance routine about your trauma. The point is to find a method that you can use right away to express yourself.
2. Strive for relaxation.
Art is naturally soothing. When you become caught up in creating an art project, it’s easy to lose your sense of time. Your stress naturally falls away, at least for a while.
A major therapeutic benefit of art is its ability to create a safe space. After a traumatic event occurs, it’s often difficult to feel safe. Rediscovering feelings of safety is an important part of creating hope for the future.
3. Avoid self-criticism.
You’re not creating art in order to become a professional artist. The quality of the work doesn’t matter; it’s the creative process that leads to benefits.
However, it’s often helpful to track your progress over time. Add the date to every piece of artwork you create. Later on, you can look back and notice the improvements, which is a great boost to your self-confidence.
4. Keep your work private.
It’s usually best only to show your completed artwork to your therapist. He or she knows how to properly respond to it.
Friends and family without the proper training might not know how to properly respond. After all, the art represents a personal tragedy, and any criticisms can feel upsetting.
Improves Mental Health and Well-Being
Engagement with the arts increases overall feelings of happiness, mental stability, and contentment. Not much time is required, either. A study from the University of Western Australia found that just two hours of exposure to the arts each week improves mental health and well-being.
Improvement results from both passive and active engagement. Active engagement is when you paint a picture, write a novel, or otherwise create something yourself. Passive engagement involves enjoying art differently. Let’s take a closer look:
Benefits of Passive Engagement with Art
Most of the benefits mentioned above apply to people who actively create art. But active art engagement isn’t the only way to increase your physical and mental health. Passive art engagement also provides many benefits.
Passive engagement involves art appreciation without active creation. Examples include attending a concert, walking through a gallery, or reading a book.
A study by neurobiologist Semir Zeki involved scanning the brains of 28 volunteers as they looked at classic paintings by Monet, Picasso, and others. Zeki discovered art could cause the immediate release of dopamine in the brain. Our brains are seemingly hard-wired to find art pleasurable.
Benefits of Art for Kids
When young children receive an arts education, they gain many long-term benefits related to academics, interpersonal relationships, and workplace performance. Generally, the earlier a child starts learning about the arts, the more profound and long-lasting the benefits become.
The point of arts education in school isn’t necessarily about transforming students into professional artists. Instead, arts education helps increase:
- Creative thinking
- Civic engagement
- Problem-solving
The National Endowment for the Arts found that art education provides significant benefits to disadvantaged and at-risk students. Specifically, disadvantaged students between eighth and 12 grade who had an arts education were three times more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than students with no exposure to the arts.
Additionally, compared to those without an arts education, at-risk students with an arts education had:
- Higher grades in STEM subjects
- Increased time spent volunteering
- More ambitious career goals
Of course, at-risk students aren’t the only ones who benefit from arts education. Here’s a closer look at some of the other benefits:
Motor Skill Improvement
Fine motor skills are the small movements of your hands. They start to develop in most children around the age of three or four. Many motions involved in creating art can help young ones develop hand strength and coordination.
The National Association for the Education of Young Children recommends the following art-related activities to help develop fine motor skills:
- Finger painting
- Holding a paintbrush, crayons, pencils, or markers
- Playing with clay and playdough
- Use safety scissors
Younger kids likely can’t write letters or color within the lines. That’s okay. The act of holding a pencil helps improve fine motor control and leads to more advanced use of writing instruments.
Language Development
Art also helps young children learn how to speak. Many kids first learn simple words such as colors and shapes, both of which are prevalent in all types of art. Even an activity as simple as scribbling with crayons provides many opportunities to expand on language skills.
Additionally, art is a useful tool for older children (elementary school and above) to explore their feelings. They can practice using descriptive terms to discuss art. For example, parents or teachers can ask a child to look at a painting and describe what they feel. Art provides opportunities for kids to learn about the language used to express inner emotions.
Improved Visual Learning
Visual-spatial skills relate to the ability to understand the information gathered from pictures and three-dimensional objects. It’s one of the first ways children learn about the world around them.
Information presented visually is more common today than ever before, thanks to the internet. Visual arts, such as drawings and paintings, help children learn how to interpret graphic symbolism and other visual information.
Increased Cultural Awareness
Art from other cultures introduces us to unfamiliar viewpoints. It’s an excellent way to expose kids to the larger world and the people who live there. According to Scholastic, when children regularly see images featuring different ethnic groups, they become more accepting of others.
A study published by the academic journal Education Next found that children gained increased historical empathy after spending a day at a museum or gallery looking at artwork from people made by people from different cultures.
Benefits for Seniors
Art provides benefits for seniors, too. The National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled Staying Engaged: Healthy Patterns of Older Americans Who Engage in the Arts. It was a comprehensive study on the potential connection between participation in the arts and overall health for people 55 or older.
While other studies have shown that participating in the arts helps improve mental and physical health, Staying Engaging is the first major study to look at both active and passive participation.
The results found that attending art events provides roughly the same benefits as creating art. Additionally, regularly doing both passive and active activities provides the most benefits. The 48.6% of respondents who said they regularly created art of their own and attended art events had:
- Higher cognitive functions
- Lower rates of hypertension
- Fewer physical limitations
Even more surprising, this group scored seven times higher on tests measuring cognitive functioning than adults who didn’t engage with the arts at all.
Seniors, Mobility, and the Arts
Mobility decreases as we age. A lack of mobility can interfere with a person’s ability to enjoy art. Fortunately, engaging with art is possible, even with limited mobility. Here’s a breakdown of the types of art the respondents preferred:
- 39.5% did visual arts such as painting, knitting, crocheting, sculpting or woodworking
- 38.4% did performing arts such as singing, playing an instrument or dancing
- 57.7% read literary fiction such as novels, poetry, and plays
As expected, less physically intense activities such as reading and painting are easier for seniors to do than activities such as singing and dancing.
The lack of mobility also plays a role in attending art events, as detailed in another NEA study, When Going Gets Tough: Barriers and Motivations Affecting Arts Attendance. The greatest barrier to attending art exhibits and performances is difficulty in navigating the venue.
As mobility decreases, passive art events become more difficult to attend. To receive the mental and emotional benefits associated with art, seniors should switch to more home-based active art such as reading and painting.
Art and Dementia
An article in AARP Magazine details how art is a powerful therapy tool for seniors who have dementia. As dementia destroys a person’s language ability, their capacity for visual creativity can increase.
Painting, drawing, sculpting, and gardening are four common creative outlets for dementia patients who have lost their language abilities. Unfortunately, this creativity usually peaks but then diminishes as the brain degenerates. However, art can help provide a sense of peace and calmness for dementia, Alzheimer’s, and similar illnesses.
Additionally, art can help prevent cognitive decline. An article from Harvard Medical School details a study about craft projects and cognitive decline. It found that people over the age of 70 who regularly made crafts had a lower risk of developing cognitive decline compared with those who did nothing at all.
Interestingly, those who made crafts also had a lower risk of cognitive impairment compared to those who only read books. While reading can help keep your mind sharp, it seems that actively creating something with your hands engages your mind more effectively than reading.
Benefits of Art for Society
Understanding the scope of art’s impact on the world can feel confusing. To help understand the impact of art, noted art professor and author Henry M. Sayre organized its benefits into four categories.
As detailed in his book, a World of Art, the four basic roles of art in society are the following:
- Maintain a historical record
- Give form to intangibles
- Reveal what’s hidden
- Show the world a new way
Let’s dive in and look at the details:
Maintain a Historical Record
Literacy wasn’t widespread among ancient people. Throughout history, visual art helped communicate ideas. Most people had an easier time understanding visual symbolism than written words.
Consider Michelangelo’s Painting of the Sistine Chapel. It depicts key scenes from the Old Testament, including the Creation of the World, Noah and the Flood, the Creation of Adam, and Expulsion from the Garden.
People back then didn’t need to read the Bible or even sit through a long sermon. They could understand the basic ideas by looking at the paintings. For example, if the viewer faces a certain altar in the Sistine Chapel, the sequence of paintings tells the entire story of the Old Testament in order.
Visual art acts as a record of humanity. For example, cave paintings date back to over 35,000 years ago. From a modern perspective, ancient art acts as a portal back in time. Modern scholars can determine a wealth of information about ancient people by studying the art they produced, including:
- Their belief systems
- Their technology
- Their appearance
- Their day-to-day lives
Art’s ability to act as a historical record provides valuable insight to societies throughout history.
Give Form to Intangibles
At one point or another, we all experience fear, pride, love, and many other emotions. However, while we recognize these feelings, they’re invisible to our senses. Art helps put form to these invisible emotions. They become solidified into an image, sound, or other types of artwork.
For instance, you don’t need a degree in art history to understand Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Practically everyone who looks at it intuitively understands that the painting signifies emotions of fear, anxiety, and existential angst.
Great art represents feelings or ideas that all humans share, but which are impossible to see and often difficult to explain. It helps create a sense of connection between people who will never meet due to history, distance, or circumstances.
Reveal the Hidden
Pablo Picasso famously said, “Art is a lie that tells the truth.” He makes a good point. All art is artificial in some way.
Great art often isn’t realistic. For example, consider Van Goh’s The Starry Night, one of the most famous paintings in history. While it’s a recognizable depiction of the night sky and a city landscape, it’s depicted in a way that’s far from realistic.
When released, The Starry Night was largely ridiculed. Other artists at the time were primarily concerned with photorealism. Art critics derided Van Gogh’s lack of realism and his broad, sloppy brushwork.
Of course, Van Gogh and his works are viewed in a much different light today. He’s considered a major inspiration for Expressionism, a painting style focused on expressing emotion instead of replicating reality.
When you look at Starry Night, you can see the landscape and sky. But the swirling colors also evoke a sense of motion, anxiety, and beauty. The painting takes a familiar scene and reveals the hidden emotions behind it.
Show the World a New Way
Art can provide a new viewpoint or interpretation of an existing idea, concept, or object. By looking through the eyes of the artist, we can see the world in a whole new way.
An excellent example of how art can change viewpoints are Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. Everyone had seen the cans before on the stores of their local grocery store. However, these everyday objects took on a whole new meaning when painted as a still life.
Warhol introduced the idea that simple, household objects can be considered art. The soup can paintings both celebrated and criticized consumerism and materialism. It was the birth of the pop art movement.
Another example of art with a unique viewpoint is Guernica by Pablo Picasso. It’s considered one of the most famous anti-war paintings ever made.
Eleven feet tall and 20 feet wide, Guernica is packed with disturbing imagery showing the horrors of war. Instead of concerning itself with photorealism, the images are impressionistic and disjointed. However, the style also conveys a clear sense of chaos, death, and devastation. It was completely unlike earlier works of art that depicted war.
The Economic Benefits of Arts
One common complaint against the arts, especially public arts, is that they take money away from other necessary services. “We’d love to have more art in our town,” you might hear, “but we don’t have the money.”
However, it’s simply not true that communities can only support the arts at the expense of other economic development. The opposite is often correct. Communities that support the arts typically see increased job opportunities, government revenue, and tourism.
Arts Can Turn a Profit
The nonprofit arts organization Americans for the Arts conducts periodic surveys related to the economic impact of art. Their 2015 report (the most recent available) titled Arts & Economic Prosperity 5 took a close look at the economic contributions of the arts in 341 communities across the nation.
The results were surprising. The organization found that the nonprofit arts and culture industry generated $166.3 billion worth of economic activity. Arts and cultural organizations generated $63.8 alone, while an additional $102.5 billion was generated from event-related expenditures, such as ticket sales to concerts and museums.
They also found that public funding often pays for itself several times over. About $5 billion worth of grants are awarded to arts organizations annually, who then generate upwards of $27.5 billion in revenue that goes to local, state, and federal governments. Additionally, the arts support 4.6 million jobs.
The arts are far from a drain on local economies. As the Americans for the Arts organization likes to say: Art means business.
Final Thoughts
As illustrated above, art has numerous benefits for both individuals and society. While the thought of fame motivates some artists, that’s certainly not true for everyone who has ever created art. For instance, a prehistoric man drawing on a cave wall probably gave little thought to what the people tens of thousands of years later would think of it.
Yet people create art all the time, even if they have no intention of showing it to anybody. It’s almost as if the drive to create art resides deep within all of us – and in many ways, that’s true.
Art soothes the soul and energizes the spirit. It allows us to express ourselves, reduce stress, and grow. Plus, it has a positive effect, including economic benefits, for communities both large and small.
The importance of art is clear. It’s a vital addition to everyone’s lives. Pick up a pencil or brush today and enjoy all the benefits of creating art.