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Art And Emotion: Why Certain Works Make Us Cry, Laugh, Or Feel Awe
- Avani
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
You're standing in a museum, slightly distracted, a bit hungry maybe, or maybe just thinking about the work you need to do tomorrow, and then you turn a corner. A painting freezes you in its gaze. You don't know why. You don't know how. Yet, there's a change in your chest, similar to a door opening into a room you never knew.
We have all had to go through this. A song plays, and you find yourself back in your 16-year-old self. The last line of a novel, or the film you are watching, plays a sad scene and your eyes well up and fill with tears, embarrassingly. All of this is pure creativity—art at its very best. Art penetrates us and re-organises things. But why? In our brains, our bodies, our souls, what happens when art moves us?
Let's delve into the question a little more - What is the connection between art and emotion?
The Ancient Philosophical Question (Aristotle's Catharsis)
For thousands of years, we have been fascinated by art, and we still are trying to understand why art moves us so much. Aristotle gave us an answer: Catharsis, the purging of emotions that have been bottled up inside us. The process is like cleansing, which gives us relief and renewal.
He argued that watching a play on stage that shows tragic suffering allows us, the viewers, to safely burn off our own grief and fear. It sends the viewers out of the theatre feeling lighter and more human; this was the world’s first theory, technically describing art as therapy.
Although. Catharsis tells only a part of the story; it can explain tears but not the spontaneous joy of a jazz solo, or the wild absurdity of Monty Python, or the breath-stealing awe of Frederic Edwin Church’s The Grand Canyon.
Because art doesn't just relieve us in one way; it not only empties us out, it fills us up as well.
The Neuroscience Of Emotional Response
Aristotle knew very little about the brain, but modern neuroscience has provided us with a new terminology for what he could only guess at. When we see art that resonates with us, the brain doesn't work like it does when we're reading a grocery list or a tax form. It glows in different ways.
Research done with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans has demonstrated that emotional music can stimulate brain reward pathways that are similar to those activated when eating, having sex, and taking drugs. Dopamine is released. The feeling that comes when a tune comes into the right tune? Neuroscientists know that they are called frisson, and they are a measurable, physiological response. Your skin prickles. Your heart rate alters. In the truest sense of the word, you're not the same person you were three minutes ago.
The case of the visual arts is not much different. Looking at representational art that portrays the human experience activates the brain's default mode network, which is related to self-reflection and empathy. We don't merely witness pain in a painting; we reproduce it. The reason why Picasso's Guernica is a stomach punch even if you've never been to war might have something to do with the existence of these wondrous cells, known as mirror neurons, which fire when we do something and again when we see someone else do it.
Laughter also has its neural signature. The brain's prediction system takes a short circuit on comedy. We are always trying to form a picture of what should occur next, and a good punch line — or a perfect physical joke — disrupts this picture precisely at the right moment. This is a release of tension and joy, a ‘gotcha' moment in your mind, one that you actually feel good about. That's what the best comedy is like: a magic trick that just happened right before your eyes.
Why Specificity In Art Creates Universality?
A paradox for every great artist: the more particular the work, the more general it seems.
A song that says ‘I was sad' resonates with no one. But a song that's a description of the kind of light that came in the afternoon on the day that somebody left, and a coffee cup that sat unwashed in the sink for three days — that song resonates with all of us. Why? The language of truth is specificity, and we are wired to recognise truth when we encounter it.
That's why literature makes us cry about fictional characters who have existed for just three hundred pages. The author has not just portrayed a person; he or she has created one, whose character has a lot of specific contradictions and specific hungers. If that character gets hurt or wins in it, it is not abstract. It's as real as anything we've lived.
A poet once remarked that a poem is convincing because of its "realised texture," and this is what was needed for my poem. The term realised texture is one that is worth mulling over. The best art is not made; it is found. It feels like it actually happened, and it weighs the grain of it. When we run into that texture, there's something in us that identifies with it, even if we've never experienced anything similar.
Awe As A Distinct And Transformative Emotion
Awe, perhaps more than any other emotion, can bring about change in art. It's also the most difficult to articulate.
Awe is described by psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt as a reaction to something that is so large, so complex, or so beautiful that it cannot be contemplated within one's current understanding of the world. They say that the feeling of Awe is the feeling of being made small in the best way.
Architecture has an innate sense for this. The great vaults, the impossibly high ceilings, the light passing through coloured glass, all of this was designed to inspire fear of the Gothic church. You were supposed to have a feeling of insignificance. You were supposed to sense the presence of something more than just a human being. Whether you're an atheist or not, you will feel something in Notre-Dame de Paris. The space is an argument.
Music can do it as well. Consider the start of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or the end of A Day in the Life when the orchestra climaxes to that final crashing chord. Consider Mahler's Second Symphony's finale, which manages to encapsulate the whole spectrum of human experience – sorrow, anguish, joy – and somehow magically, improbably, ends up as if it were peace.
In fact, awe gets us to feel part of something greater than ourselves, researchers have found. It's able to quieten down those areas of the brain that produce endless chatter of self-referential thoughts and doubts. The self silences itself for a brief time. That is why awe-inspiring art has always been linked to the spiritual irrespective of the formal religion. It provides the mystics' state of ekstasis, a standing outside oneself.
Why Are Different People Moved By Different Things?
Not all paintings appeal to everyone: Not all of the puns work. Throughout the history of art, there have been examples of works that were once ridiculed, unknown, or scorned and are now regarded as masterpieces.
Taste is personal. Culture shapes response. Context is everything.
Music that brings happy memories to one person may bring sadness to another simply because that music was playing on the radio when someone they know passed away. A painting can be constrictive or free, depending on what cultural context you can bring to it. We react emotionally to art, and these reactions are not, as it were, hard-wired outputs, but a negotiation between the piece of art, our personal history, and the culture we have been raised in, and that is complex.
It is one of the great gifts of art as well: it is a space where you, the singular unique you, can appear, the unique vision, the other person, can appear, and there you are in relation with one another. The experience is never repeated. You will go to the art and the art will give back to you at the time you go to it.
The Role Of Artistic Risk
There's one more thing to add, and it's the most crucial: art takes risks. Great art is always doing something that might not work. The comedian who goes for the punch-line that needs a bit too much finesse. The novelist who concludes the work in a manner that initially doesn't seem to make sense and then, gradually, does. The artist who leaves a blank canvas and hopes for you to feel the emptiness.
Risk gives rise to true feelings. We know when an artist is playing it safe, and we are not moved. But when the work has an expense, when it has a feeling of being on the road somewhere we aren't sure whether we're going to see, we feel that. We feel the stakes. Then, when work lands, the emotional response is not just pleasure. It's gratitude.
Read More: - Can Art Represent Our Feelings?
A Closing Reflection On Why Art Matters
So how does emotion in art work? Why does art make us cry, laugh, and stand in wordless wonder? It's the most direct technology we've ever invented for sharing the inner life. The feel of it, the texture of experience — it makes us feel what it is like to be a conscious being on this planet at this time in this body of flesh.
All great works of art are messages in a bottle. It is saying — I felt this. Did you? And when the answer is yes — when across all the distances of time and culture and biography, something in us arises to meet something in the artwork — we are, for a moment, less alone. For a moment we're briefly part of something bigger than our life.
And this, in a way, is the reason why we continue to create works of art and continue to be moved by works of art, more than anything else: a neurological explanation.
To be moved is to be reminded of life. We need the reminder – more than we like to think we ever need it.
