The Art of the Unsettling

Feel-good art is nice, isn’t it?  Who doesn’t enjoy settling down into a lovely melody, gazing at a gorgeous landscape painting, or losing themselves in a pleasant book?

But such uplifting works only comprise a portion of humanity’s artistic production.  It can’t all be butterflies and rainbows.  In art, as in life, there’s a dark shadow beneath the prettiest of clouds.

Take Kafka, for example.  His fiction shows the powerlessness and inanity of a human existence lived not only within the confines of birth and death, but also in a labyrinthine hellscape of our own creation. Give it Up!, a story of just a few sentences, offers an exemplary look at the helplessness he so skillfully captured.  

In music we have Schoenberg, that modern maverick who composed music with a devastating, atonal dissonance that doesn’t merely describe anxiety, but actually recreates it.  Check out his Drei Klavierstucke for a taste.  

We can imagine the creator of uplifting works lying on their deathbed thinking, “Well I can rest easy, knowing I made so many people just a little bit happier, their lives just a touch more pleasant.”  But what can Schoenberg, Kafka, and co. claim to have done?  Injected anxiety into unsuspecting victims?  Catalyzed the fear and existential unease in us all?

And yet we feel instinctively that this art deserves its place in the cultural pantheon.  Why?  Because we appreciate how it captures aspects of life and human nature that have always existed.

Take Schoenberg, for example.  As much as we enjoy soothing melodies and consonant tones, we know life is more than a walk through a breezy meadow.  There are emotions we feel that the gorgeous cello of Brahm’s Third Symphony (third movement) just couldn’t possibly represent.  In fact, no tonal, consonant, pleasing music could ever match the emotional pitch of certain moments and situations.  Schoenberg realized this and composed music that embodies the manic, the nerve-wracked, the nightmarish, the insane. 

The key is that these artists don’t create these feelings of anxiety and pain- they don’t conjure them out of thin air.  What they do is capture those feelings as they already existed.  That is why we appreciate their work.  It’s also why we need them. 

We can’t eradicate the pain and stress of life.  We’re all going to die.  Life is hard.  None of us know what the hell we’re doing.  There’s no changing all that.  What we can do is strive to understand our predicament, and that’s where this hectic art proves useful.  Identifying the painful sensations we so often feel in a work of art outside ourselves, letting it pass through us, and sensing it come out the other side is, in some way, a spiritual and healing event.  It fires our brains and sets our own humanity glowing.  Once we’ve experienced it, we can’t imagine living without it. 

Art isn’t a narcotic; it’s a psychedelic, and sometimes it takes you on a bad trip.  But that’s alright.  In fact, it’s perfect.  We wouldn’t have it any other way.  

All that being said, there is, of course, relief to be found in a well-rounded selection of books, songs, and paintings.  The pain-capturing and pain-inducing works serve a useful function, but so do more uplifting pieces.  Spending your whole life reading Metamorphosis, listening to Le sacre de printemps, and looking at Saturn Devouring His Son probably isn't healthy.  Give all those works their due, then put your feet up, take a glance at Monet, put on some breezy Brahms, and open to the first page of a nice beach read.  In the art of life, a true master wets their brush with all the colors of the emotional pallet.