ABSTRACT
In a psychotherapeutic age, what might be the role and responsibility of culture and the arts in times of human travail? Beginning with a discussion of the arts, as broadly defined, and the tragedy of September 11, 2001, this chapter examines the connection between aesthetic experience, works of art and personal resilience. Specifically, it creates an idealized exhibition responding to an experience of parental bereavement, identifying some artworks as antidotes or homeopathic remedies. For example, anomie and alienation are considered via a Munch painting, linking to the news photographs of “9/11”; pathos within the mother-child relationship with reference to works by Raphael and Kollwitz; and hope and joy amid personal crisis by evoking a “playwall” of Van Gogh’s paintings. Community art in the form of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, art therapy in response to road trauma and a lesson in resilience via the paintings of Australian Indigenous artist Rover Thomas are also brought into the select sequence. Overall, as works of culture bear witness to the inescapable experience of human suffering, so an engagement in the arts (as a viewer, in this analysis) can be considered a resilient response to trauma, loss and bereavement, and a valid way to find purpose and meaning.
