These artworks have the capacity to alter our perceptions: of ourselves, certain concepts, the history or present or future of the world. Many of my favorite visual artworks reorient my perception of beauty (making a beautiful thing boring, making an ugly thing interesting); many of my favorite literary artworks change my perception of morality (by... See more

Yet one of art’s most compelling features is how it showcases the disjuncts between the time of composition, the time of dissemination, and the time of consideration—disjuncts that can summon us to humility and wonder. Such temporal amplitude understandably falls out of favor in politically polarized times, in which the pressure to make clear

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But then I realized that good art—at least the art I am spontaneously drawn to—has little to do with communication. Instead, it is about crafting patterns of information that, if you feed them sustained attention, will begin to structure your attentional field in interesting ways. Art is guided meditation. The point isn’t the words, but what... See more