The question of what art means touches on the essence of our existence and is of essential value for society's resilience. Cultural awareness is becoming an important precondition for every individual to be able to move around in an increasingly diverse society. Being actively involved in art and culture offers children, young people and adults opportunities to shape their own way of being in the world, their relationship with others and with society, and thus their identity. People can shape their identity through cultural participation. This leads to deeper questions about art and meaning and questions about the meaning of art and cultural-historical artefacts for the way people relate to the world.
Connecting character
This topic connects a number of questions that address the meaning of art for people from different perspectives. It involves both practical and fundamental research into the relationship between aesthetic experience, knowledge production and ethical stance as well as research into the role of art consumption and perception and the importance of art for our well-being. Art can evoke strong emotions, play a role in social interaction and have therapeutic effects. The starting point for research in this field can be a formalist or socio-cultural approach, i.e. from the arts themselves. But it is also possible to seek explanations from the brain for the strong emotions that different art forms can evoke, as is the case in the relatively new field of neuro-aesthetics. The question concerns the whole chain from cultural production to consumption and reception in a very broad sense. The research is also socially important because it ties in with the search for art's contribution to society that has begun with the cutbacks on culture. At the same time, Dutch cultural policy has for years been focusing on cultural participation because it sees culture as a binding element for society. On a more individual level, the question of emotions addresses the new possibilities created by the connection between cultural history and neurological research.
