Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

Art is exploration. Artists train people to see. Most people with any exposure to art now regard the work of the impressionists, for example, as both self-evidently beautiful and relatively traditional. This is in no small part because we all perceive the world now, at least in part, in the manner that only impressionists could manage in the latter half of the nineteenth century. We cannot help doing so, because the impressionist aesthetic has saturated everything: advertisements, movies, popular posters, comic books, photographs—all forms of visual art. Now we all see the beauty of light that only the impressionists could once apprehend. They taught us this. But when the impressionists first displayed their paintings—in the Salon des Refusés of 1863, as the traditional Paris Salon had rejected them—the pieces were met with laughter and contempt. The idea of perceiving that way (paying particular attention to light, essentially, rather than form) was so radical that it caused people to have emotional fits.