It has long been thought that visual art enables new “possibilities of feeling,” allowing us to perceive the world directly through the lenses of emotions. Seeing twentieth-century German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s portrayals of grief—she lost two of her children at young ages—opens our eyes to what the world looks like during experiences of loss. Jim Goldberg’s photographs in
For Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, a point of visual art is to evoke mystical feeling and “preserve the soul” through such “Stimmung,” or mood:
[In great art] the spectator does feel a corresponding thrill in himself. . . . Indeed the Stimmung of a picture can deepen and purify that of the spectator. Such works of art at least preserve the soul from coarseness; they “key it up,” so to speak, to a certain height, as a tuning-key the strings of a musical instrument.
Visual art fine-tunes our experience of awe. Rest your eyes on a Huichol string painting from Mexico and you may sense you are hallucinating. South African artist Ernest Mancoba’s paintings of spiritual experience are suffused with the bright, otherworldly light of mystical awe and interconnectedness of forms. Berlin’s omnipresent street art—portrayals of ecstatic dancers or odd, dreamlike beings—may lead you to see the city through the lens of awe. Psychedelic artists like Alex Grey have sought to capture what it is like to see the world in a mystical moment on psychedelics. Art is a door of perception and can function as a lens of awe.
How visual art leads to the direct perception of awe inspired Rebecca Stone to forty years of study of Mesoamerican art. She has published papers on Andean textiles, Mexican tomb sculptures, carvings on Incan agricultural devices, Ecuadorian petroglyphs, and the architecture of the Wari Empire (from 600 to 1100 AD in central Peru). She synthesizes these discoveries in her book
Within many Mesoamerican cultures, visual art preserves experiences of awe cultivated in what some call shamanism. Through the use of medicinal plants, dance, dreams, and ceremony, a shaman enables experiences of mystical awe for community members in which boundaries between self and others vanish, a sense of interdependence and proximity to a universal life force is felt, and a shared consciousness with other species and supernatural beings is sensed.
These experiences are archived in chants and songs, ceremonies, systems of knowledge about the powers of plants and other species, and visual art and design. Carvings, paintings, masks, woven baskets, and figurines decorate public and private spaces, their patterns stirring us to see the world through awe-inspiring undulating movement, spirals, iridescent color, and unusual illumination. Human and nonhuman hybrid figures—the merging of categories—are a common visual motif, challenging default expectations.
Viewing art activates the dopamine network in the brain. When paintings decorate the walls in public buildings and offices, people’s minds open to wonder: they demonstrate greater creativity, inspiration, problem-solving abilities, and openness to others’ perspectives. Art empowers our saintly tendencies. One impressive study, which involved more than thirty thousand people in the United Kingdom, found that people who practiced more art, like painting and dance, and viewed more art, for example by going to museums or musical performances, volunteered more in their community and gave more money away two years after the study’s completion.
Visual design that encourages more everyday awe also promotes collective health and well-being. One recent study from Denmark found that hanging paintings on hospital walls led patients to feel more secure, to get out of their beds and socialize more, and to come to understand their illnesses within a broader narrative about the cycle of life. In cities judged from photos to be more evocative of visual awe, people report more robust health, even after controlling for income and local levels of pollution. In cities with pathways for walking, orienting landmarks, squares, and public buildings like libraries—elements of urban design that locate us within geometries of urban social living—people feel more open and report greater health and well-being. Simply being near cathedrals and in chapels inclines people to greater cooperation. Awe-based visual design enables us to see the world through awe, locating our individual selves within larger life patterns of interdependence.
Shock and Awe
