Tingles behind the eyes

There is a curious phenomena called Stendhal Syndrome, a term coined by a psychiatrist who worked in Florence and had attended, over the years, to countless foreign tourists who would fall ill when in presence of monuments and works of art in the historical Italian city. Stendhal Syndrome is recognized by psychology as a psychosomatic reaction to esthetic beauty in art. Its symptoms can range from depressive anxiety and euphoria to panic attacks and altered perception of colors and sound.

A few times in my life I was lucky enough to stand face to face to a renowned work of art, and the experience of such beauty can be breathtaking, almost overwhelming. I cried only once, when I had the chance to see Monet's Les Nymphéas. I had a book about Monet when I was younger and was obsessed with the colors and shapes he could capture. Seeing it first hand was one of the most intense "famous art" experiences I've ever had. It wasn't Stendhal Syndrome, but it was a good cry.

I don't know about you, but my feeling is that we are losing our sensibility to experience good art - and not just art like the Mona Lisa or whatever the British Museum would steal from other countries, but any sort of art. We have so much great art around, our quality bar is so high and our digital relationship with pieces of art is so detached that we barely have time to experience them. There is a dispute for our attention happening 24/7 - each sign on the street screams for your time, every color popping, every sound loud, every weekend 10 new things to consume on Netflix, of which five will be just meh but one will be absolutely great. Every. Damned. Week.

And yet we live in a world where stuff like the muqarnas exist, that even in a picture can make me wonder if this is what an actual depiction of a superior high being would look like, and also not one but two terrible cinematic versions of Suicide Squad. We have the power and the knowledge to create infinite wonder that is often bypassed as just another picture, just another song, just another game. The inherent overwhelmingness of our times takes away our sensibility. Maybe that's why we admire the past, the times when creating awe-inspiring art was "harder", in a sense. Not because it is now less laborious, but because it is so much more common than it once was, for the simple fact that we are more people with more technology and more education. Is that taking away the beauty of present-era art, in our eyes? Can we still allow ourselves to cry simply because something human-made took our breath away?

-Maíra