The Brooklyn Rail

It’s no surprise that empathy is in short supply. Some are even calling it a sin. We sense this deficit in ourselves and in the world writ large, amid what feels like an endless parade of calamities that are too often quickly unremembered. Filtered through the flickering screens that dominate our waking lives, images of conflict and disaster, hatred and dehumanization, information and misinformation overwhelm us and feed isolation, emptiness, and divisiveness. Can we instead boost community, tenderness, and love? If empathy begets compassion and compassion begets care, how do we get there? To dig ourselves out of the déjà veux—the unceasing hole of doom—art, the portal that generates the aesthetic politics of poetry, gesture and movement can offer space for some semblance of where one may begin.

As a curator, I have experienced art as a pathway to empathy. Art is deeply intertwined with empathy; the etymology of empathy is rooted in the German Einfühlung, which roughly translates to “in feeling.” The philosopher Robert Vischer coined the term in 1873 to describe the human ability to project oneself into an artwork, in the hopes of understanding the work and the artist’s perspective through the lens of one’s own experiences. This emotional infectiousness was famously described by Mark Rothko, who said, “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” Helping us to explore ourselves, connect with others, encounter the world through different eyes—these are things that art can awaken in us if we open ourselves and allow it to happen. Artists bring us such gifts; their work shines light on things we don’t see on our own and helps us imagine a world we’d like to see. Alone or together, it may allow us to understand ourselves better, too, through various trajectories of consideration.

As artists and lovers of art, how do we begin to unravel the dominant narratives of today and envision new, more empathetic ones? And how can museums meet this moment? On a recent visit to the Seattle Art Museum, I encountered a gallery labeled “Lessons from the Institute of Empathy,” which encouraged visitors through text, video prompts, and artworks to step outside of themselves to consider others’ experiences. It may seem a little sad that we require a prompt for this. Yet this is where and who we are right now, and efforts like these point to what museums (and we all) can do: literally and figuratively carve out spaces that cultivate compassion and care. The spaces in which we help foster change can benefit not only ourselves but the world around us.