Invisible Creature

The Arts Are in Crisis. Here’s How Biden Can Help.

The pandemic has decimated the livelihoods of those who work in the arts. How can the new administration intervene and make sure it doesn’t happen again? A critic offers an ambitious plan.


Jason Farago

Published Jan. 13, 2021
Updated Jan. 15, 2021

What is art’s function? What does art do for a person, a country?

Scholars, economists, revolutionaries keep debating, but one very good answer has held now for 2,500 years. The function of art, Aristotle told us, is catharsis. You go to the theater, you listen to a symphony, you look at a painting, you watch a ballet. You laugh, you cry. You feel pity, fear. You see in others’ lives a reflection of your own. And the catharsis comes: a cleansing, a clarity, a feeling of relief and understanding that you carry with you out of the theater or the concert hall. Art, music, drama — here is a point worth recalling in a pandemic — are instruments of psychic and social health.

Balthus / Cats and young girls

Balthus

Bizarre Balthus show reveals artist's fixation with cats and young girls

More character study than retrospective, the Met's provocative new Balthus exhibition has an unsettling undertone

by Jason Farago

The Guardian, Monday 21 October 2013

Thérèse Dreaming by Balthus, 1938. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 © Balthus

If current trends continue, in just a few years all of contemporary culture will be nothing but an unending stream of cat pictures. Newspapers desperate to survive will publish only adorable kitten photos; social networks will strain under the weight of shorthairs and Siamese. The art world is already getting in on the act: witness the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis hosting an internet cat video festival (it drew 10,000 viewers in one day), or White Columns, the avant-garde New York gallery, laying on The Cat Show, featuring "purr-formers in residence". The Brooklyn Museum recently rehung its august Egyptian collection in a display called "Divine Felines."