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Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope...

Brené Brown

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The Transformative Power of Art

Topic: Creativity, Culture, & the Arts

Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope… Music, like all art, gives pain and our most wrenching emotions voice, language, and form, so that it can be recognized and shared. The magic of the high lonesome sound* is the magic of all art: the ability to both capture our pain and deliver us from it at the same time… The transformative power of art is in this sharing. Without connection or collective engagement, what we hear is simply a caged song of sorrow and despair; we find no liberation in it. It’s the sharing of art that whispers, “You’re not alone.”

Brené Brown
Humanism, Arts and Sciences
Braving the Wilderness

Brown, Brené. Braving the Wilderness: the Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone. Thorndike Press, a Part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2018, pp. 44-45 [Brené Brown. Braving the Wilderness].

Brené Brown

Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness

When I look through the two-hundred-thousand-plus pieces of data my team and I have collected over the past fifteen years, I can only conclude our world is in a collective spiritual crisis. This is especially true if you think about the core of that definition of “spirituality” from The Gifts of Imperfection:

“Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion.”

—Brené Brown [Braving the Wilderness: the Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone] pp. 44-45.

High Lonesome

“Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope…. Only art can take the holler of a returning soldier and turn it into a shared expression and a deep, collective experience. Music, like all art, gives pain and our most wrenching emotions voice, language, and form, so that it can be recognized and shared. The magic of the high lonesome sound* is the magic of all art: the ability to both capture our pain and deliver us from it at the same time…

—Brené Brown [Braving the Wilderness: the Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone] pp. 44-45.

*High lonesome is a sound or type of music in the bluegrass tradition. Its roots go back to Bill Monroe, Roscoe Holcomb, and the bluegrass region of Kentucky.

Resources

  • Brené Brown website. Braving the Wilderness
  • HIGH LONESOME - The Story of Bluegrass Music (from the feature film by Rachel Liebling).

Related Quotes

  • Art Is - Leo N. Tolstoy, What Is Art?
  • The Most Beautiful Experience - Albert Einstein, The World as I See It
  • Uniquely Among the Arts - Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia
  • True Belonging - Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness
  • Where Everything Is Music - Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi, Where Everything Is Music
  • You Are Creative - Wynton Marsalis, Moving to Higher Ground
  • The Transformative Power of Art - Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness

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