Emotional Equity

César A. Cruz, a Mexican poet, once said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Art is the great equalizer that lures both us eccentrics and the regular folks toward a common ground. It celebrates the organized chaos of the disturbed and leads them to catharsis. It awakens the fire still smoldering in the hearts of the comfortable and shows them how to find peace among the twisted unknown. All our paths lead to the same destination. Some of us just have a more convoluted line to get there.

Some of us make art to feel something. Some of us make art to toss a feeling out as far as we can, never to be seen again. Art can help you avoid bottling things up by forcing you to confront them, feel them, and reproduce them in your medium of choice. It can hold a lens up to your darkest fears and deepest desires in a way that the outside world can see and understand. It leaves your heart exposed and naked to be regarded and appreciated. It allows you to revel in the deliciously painful way it ties some people’s stomachs into knots instead. As an observer, you need to open your mind to the journey the message wishes to bring you on.

Art fertilizes the seeds of emotion that lay dormant below the surface of our society — what we’re afraid to feel and become, what we’re afraid to lose and gain. Every individual’s perception is as unique as their fingerprint. Our emotions are products of our memories, values, and experiences.

Two people can stand in front of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and have wildly different emotions spring from them. One feels a pang of annoyance when a memory of stocking grocery shelves at work pops into their mind. Another gets a warm, fuzzy feeling remembering how her mother used to make her tomato soup when she was sick. Even the person standing just behind them with skeptical eyes and crossed arms, who insists to his friends that he doesn’t see the point of these, happens to get a few cans of soup at the supermarket the next day for the first time in years after a seemingly random craving.

I still like blasting the saddest Joy Division songs in existence and dancing around my living room to return to my baseline when the world feels like too much. When I was in high school, my mother would frown whenever she would hear my “sad music.” She would ask, “Why do you listen to that sad music? I don’t like how it makes me feel.” Isn’t that the point? We’re on level ground now. Now you understand exactly where my baseline is and what that feels like.