Get the Picture

Works of art, Hoel contends, are artificial dreams that serve the same function: "Just like dreams, fictions and art keep us from overfitting our perception, models, and understanding of the world."

What's beautiful depends on who we are, what we've encountered, where we live, and when. Likewise, the art that opens us to the chaotic stream of reality-the art we find beautiful-changes with time and with us, as we evolve. Beauty, I'd come to think, doesn't have to have a physical form, and it certainly doesn't have to be something we agree on. B

What if beauty was just our name for experiences that push us out of our mental ruts and burst open our reducing valves of consciousness?

Following Julie's lead, I'd started viewing the everyday the way I looked at art—with an extra beat, with an inquisitive eye, with a willingness to linger on form and ask why.

We're drawn to artwork that subtly deviates from our predictions of the world-"Too much prediction error is unpleasant or even disturbing; none or too little is boring"-and new art movements may emerge as our predictions adjust to (and get bored with) the new images around us. (We initially reject cutting-edge art because it's too far afi

The artist Gina Malek had made a similar suggestion …. "Just walk up to a piece and try to think of five things that it brings up," she suggested. Not five things that the art is about. The observations don't need to be grandiose, like this probes masculinity in the postinternet age. Just, what are five things you notice, either in the wo

Like nibbling on a magic mushroom, turning an art eye on reality makes you feel as if the world is performing just for you.

I'd come to think our brains needed help transforming from trash compactors into microscopes, and that's where art comes in: a way to fight our instincts to truncate and elide, and, in so doing, to notice more, appreciate more, empathize more. Which is all to say, to experience more. If our lives are the set of experiences that we collect, then art

The jostle we get from art can be found nearly anywhere. There is an artist in each of us to the extent that we struggle to keep our brains from compressing our experience. Art is a choice. It is a fight against complacency. It is a decision to forge a life that's richer, more uncomfortable, more mindblowing, more uncertain. And ultimately, more be