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The Empathy Racket

Aug 31, 2023, 4 min read

The Empathy Racket

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Key takeaways

  • Art institutions are now clinging to empathy-building as the motivation for their existence.
  • The author argues that this is unreasonable

If museums must justify their existence, they should to do so honestly, on the basis of what the items in their collections demonstrate for audiences. Museums teach history. Museums present the heterogeneous intellectual and artistic heritages that any person, living in a liberal society of individual freedoms, can claim for herself.

Art should not be expected to make one feel better, in some therapeutic sense, or make one a better person, in a moral sense. Art should make one feel more human, more alive to one’s own spontaneity, contradictions, and irrationality.

Highlights

  • In this new century, scholars, educators, curators, arts writers, museum administrators, and cultural critics have made empathy their great basis for defending and promoting the arts. As they now see it, encounters with artworks engage and strengthen our ability to empathize, and herein lies art’s value to humankind.

  • Administered effectively, art is a means by which people can be coaxed into greater emotional understanding of others, and this in turn will impact their behavior in myriad favorable ways. Empathy makes one a better person and citizen. But it does not end with the individual. Somehow, too, empathy makes us better collectively. To see this, first one must make the very sophisticated diagnosis that our political, institutional, economic, and social problems are the direct result of a perceivable lack of interpersonal understanding on the scale of individuals. From there, it can tidily be deduced that greater empathy will lead to progress in all areas. All this from how we choose to read poems and look at frescoes.

  • Criticism of the empathy racket can sound like criticism of the subject of an empath’s passion, and of passion itself, and of empathy. But the reasoning behind the default to empathy is what’s shallow and deadening.

  • Art museums, she says, should “amplify their public value by participating in and leading social change efforts.” Such activist efforts are at the heart of the growing “empathy movement” across museums, which shares much of its platform with the growing antiracism movement.

  • Museum goers—not to say taxpayers—may well ask themselves whether it should be the responsibility of museums to attend to society’s present-day ills or instead to preserve and display culturally significant artefacts and art.

  • If museums must justify their existence, they should to do so honestly, on the basis of what the items in their collections demonstrate for audiences. Museums teach history. Museums present the heterogeneous intellectual and artistic heritages that any person, living in a liberal society of individual freedoms, can claim for herself.

  • The hubris that we live in the most sophisticated or interesting period in history is demolished by visits to museums, which show how people long dead, in cultures foreign to anyone alive today, had inner lives as rich, skills as masterful, and belief systems as limiting yet sufficient as our own.

  • confuse correlation and causation. Individuals who are more empathic in the first place—and who are more interested in subjectivity and relationships generally—are the ones who enjoy and make time for reading novels. They read because they are empathic, not the other way around.

  • There’s a desperation about all this research into proving, empirically, fiction’s cognitive effects. You can tell a utilitarian by how he relishes hard data relating to emotion and the arts. If scientists can only prove that hearing music and looking at sculpture increases empathy, crowds will flock to the concert halls and galleries.

  • To conclude, empathy has no inherent value when it comes to aesthetic appreciation.

  • How the individual values art is a matter of personal judgment, of cultivated aesthetic sensibility, which is an aliveness to the full emotional, psychological, intellectual, and sensual dimensions of one’s life.

  • Art should not be expected to make one feel better, in some therapeutic sense, or make one a better person, in a moral sense. Art should make one feel more human, more alive to one’s own spontaneity, contradictions, and irrationality.

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