Why Art Matters

Ivey Rucket brings us out of our mundane tasks and into the galleries with a reminder of why art matters. By Ivey Rucket, Senior Manager of Digital Communications, High Museum of Art It was ten o’clock on an oppressively hot morning and I had just spent the past hour swapping unproductive emails with the accounts receivable department of a search engine company. I am withholding the name of the company, but antitrust laws aside, you probably know what it is. Faced with the existential dread of having to waste another moment sending emails into a deliberately labyrinthine void, I decided to clear my mind with a trip into the museum. Patches of tree-filtered sunlight streamed through the windows as I climbed the concrete stairs to the Skyway Level and made my way into a cool, quiet gallery. I was searching for what Duncan Phillips described as “the two great gifts of emotion” that art can offer — “the emotion of recognition and the emotion of escape. Both take us out of the boundaries of self.” [1] As an employee of the High, I am fortunate to have regular access to a bottomless well of recognition and escape. And because I grew up in Atlanta, my relationship with the museum began well before I was hired. When I was sixteen years old, on a school trip to the High, I stumbled upon a kinetic sculpture by Rebecca Horn titled <a href="https://high.org/collection/drunken-beetle/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Drunken Beetle</a>.[2] The work was a delicate structure made of typewriter ribbons and steel. It held two small glasses filled with Fernet-Branca, and it thrashed against the wall in a slow, relentless, methodical loop. <a href="https://medium.com/high-museum-of-art/why-art-matters-f1b604cdac61">Learn More</a>