# How can beauty save the world? ![[Notes/20 Shareable/24 Creativity 💡/Beauty will save the world]] Aesthetically-pleasing environments improve our well-being, behavior, cognitive function, and mood.[^1] ![[I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street]] [[Art is resistance]]. "Cultural worker" is a term historically used by socialists, Black nationalists, and other radical organizers. Cultural workers work to create a culture of liberation.[^2] ![[My painting ... is a counter-offensive —René Magritte]] Katherine Anne Porter says, "In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away."[^3] [^1]: [Why Beautiful Things Make us Happy – Beauty Explained](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O5kNPlUV7w) [^2]: [Cultural Worker, Not A "Creative"](https://medium.com/@DevynSpringer/cultural-worker-not-a-creative-4695ae8bfd2d) [^3]: [What Rises from the Ruins: Katherine Anne Porter on the Power of the Artist and the Function of Art in Human Life – The Marginalian](https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/08/06/katherine-anne-porter-art/)