Should Art Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable?

Art can console us when the world becomes unbearable and confront us when we have become too comfortable within it. But does art have a duty to do either?

There is a phrase that has become something close to a modern definition of artistic purpose: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” It is commonly attributed to educator and activist Cesar A. Cruz, although versions of the sentiment have circulated widely and the phrase is also frequently, and unreliably, attributed to Banksy. Its deeper ancestry resembles Finley Peter Dunne’s early twentieth-century description of the newspaper as something that “comforts the afflicted” while “afflicting the comfortable.” Whatever its precise history, the phrase survives because it captures something recognisable about our relationship with art.

We turn to songs when our hearts are broken. We return to novels when we feel alone. We stand before paintings because somebody who lived decades or centuries before us somehow found a visual language for an emotion we have never been able to articulate. Yet art also wounds, confronts and embarrasses. It makes visible what societies would sometimes rather leave invisible. A film can force us to inhabit the consciousness of somebody whose life bears almost no resemblance to our own. A photograph can destroy the emotional distance between ourselves and suffering. A novel can make respectable society appear absurd. A song can transform private anger into collective recognition.

Art can whisper, you are not alone, while simultaneously asking, how have you managed to become so comfortable? That tension between consolation and confrontation may be one of art’s greatest powers. But there is a problem hidden inside the quotation: the word should. Once we decide what art should do, we begin imposing obligations upon something whose freedom may depend precisely upon its refusal to obey them.

The Strange Comfort of Being Understood

There are moments when art does something that ordinary conversation cannot. You hear a song and recognise yourself, not approximately or intellectually, but completely. Someone has somehow transformed an emotion you believed belonged only to you into melody, language, rhythm or image. This is one of art’s deepest forms of consolation. It does not necessarily remove suffering. The relationship remains broken. The person remains dead. The loneliness remains. The injustice continues. But something has changed: the experience has been witnessed.

That distinction matters because art often comforts not by telling us everything will be fine, but by refusing to lie about the fact that sometimes it will not. There is enormous comfort in encountering another consciousness that understands despair. Think about the experience of listening to a devastating song after heartbreak. We do not necessarily want the musician to cheer us up. Quite often, the opposite is true. We deliberately choose music that intensifies the emotion.

On the surface, this seems irrational. Why listen to sadness when you are already sad? Because emotional recognition can itself be comforting. The song says: someone else has been here. The novelist says: someone else has thought this. The filmmaker says: someone else has seen the world this way. The painter says: someone else has felt something they could not explain. Art creates a bridge between private consciousnesses. For a few minutes, the terrible isolation of being oneself becomes slightly less absolute.

That may be why the darkest works of art can sometimes provide the greatest comfort. They do not comfort us by escaping darkness. They comfort us by entering it. There is something profoundly human about another person being willing to descend into grief, loneliness, fear or despair and return with something they have made from the experience. The artwork cannot remove our pain, but it can give that pain a shape, and sometimes having a shape for something previously shapeless is enough to make it bearable.

Art as Disturbance

But art has another history. It has also been a magnificent troublemaker. Artists have challenged religion, sexuality, class, race, gender, war, capitalism, empire, morality, respectability and virtually every other structure human beings have constructed around themselves. Sometimes this confrontation has been deliberate. At other times, artists have disturbed society simply by making visible something that society preferred not to see.

The disturbing artwork interrupts our habits of perception. It asks us to look again. This matters because human beings are remarkably good at becoming accustomed to things. We become accustomed to inequality, violence, prejudice and loneliness. We become accustomed to systems that might appear horrifying if encountered for the first time but become almost invisible through repetition. What was once shocking becomes ordinary. What was once intolerable becomes part of the background.

Comfort, therefore, can become a form of blindness. Art can interrupt that blindness. The disturbing artwork enters the comfortable room and opens the curtains. Suddenly something previously hidden becomes impossible not to notice. This does not mean politically confrontational art is automatically good art. A work can possess impeccable politics and still be aesthetically lifeless. Moral seriousness cannot compensate for artistic failure. But at its best, art can make abstractions human. A statistic describes suffering; art can make us feel the existence of the person contained inside the statistic.

The Artist as Witness

Nina Simone understood this particularly clearly. During a famous interview, Simone argued that an artist’s duty, as she understood it, was to reflect the times. Her music demonstrates what happens when artistic expression and historical experience become inseparable. Songs such as Mississippi Goddam did not merely comment upon the American civil rights struggle from a safe distance. They emerged from Simone’s experience of living through that history.

There is something powerful in the idea of the artist as witness. The artist observes what is happening around them and creates a record that is emotional rather than merely documentary. History books can tell future generations what happened, but art can sometimes communicate something more elusive: what it felt like to be alive while it was happening. The fear, rage, confusion, hope and contradictions of an era can survive within its music, paintings, photographs, films and literature.

But Simone’s position raises a difficult question. Does every artist possess this responsibility? Must the painter respond to injustice? Must the songwriter write protest songs? Must the filmmaker expose political hypocrisy? Must the novelist confront society? What about the artist who simply wants to paint flowers, write love songs or make strange electronic music at three o’clock in the morning because the sound fascinates them? Surely there must also be room for that. If we insist that every artwork must possess a socially useful purpose, something important begins disappearing. Art becomes an assignment, and artists become civil servants of morality.

The Danger of Demanding Useful Art

Oscar Wilde offers perhaps the most provocative counterargument. In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde famously declares: “All art is quite useless.” The statement sounds dismissive until we understand what Wilde is defending. He was arguing against the idea that art required moral justification. In the same preface, Wilde insists that there are no moral or immoral books, only books that are well or badly written. Art, in this aestheticist conception, does not need to demonstrate its social usefulness in order to justify its existence.

This radically complicates the claim that art should comfort or disturb. Perhaps art should not have to do anything. Perhaps beauty is enough. Perhaps curiosity is enough. Perhaps experimentation is enough. Perhaps pleasure is enough. Perhaps an artist making something simply because they feel compelled to make it is enough. The existence of art need not always be justified by its ability to improve us.

There is something dangerous about demanding usefulness from art. Once society decides that art must serve a purpose, the next question inevitably becomes: whose purpose? Political movements have repeatedly attempted to answer that question. Religious authorities have answered it. Governments have answered it. Markets answer it every day. Algorithms increasingly answer it. Make something patriotic. Make something morally uplifting. Make something politically acceptable. Make something commercially successful. Make something shareable. Make something inspirational. Make something that generates engagement.

These demands may come from very different places, but they share the same assumption: art must justify itself by producing an approved result. The rebellious artist replies: no. I made it because I needed to. That refusal is important because artistic freedom means accepting that artists will sometimes create things we dislike, misunderstand or even find offensive. A culture that genuinely values artistic freedom cannot defend only the art with which it agrees.

When Disturbance Becomes Performance

There is another problem. Contemporary culture often confuses provocation with profundity. To shock someone is relatively easy. To disturb them meaningfully is much harder. An artwork can contain violence, sexuality, blasphemy, obscenity or political provocation without actually challenging anything. Sometimes transgression becomes its own convention. The audience arrives expecting to be shocked, the artist shocks them, and everyone goes home satisfied. Disturbance has become entertainment.

This is particularly complicated in an attention economy. Provocation travels well online. Outrage produces engagement. Controversy produces clicks. Anger produces comments. The machinery of social media therefore creates a strange incentive for artists, commentators and institutions to manufacture disturbance constantly. When everything is described as shocking, controversial, offensive or groundbreaking, genuine artistic provocation becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from marketing.

But genuine artistic disturbance is different from outrage. Outrage tells us immediately what to feel. Great art often makes us uncertain about what we feel. It leaves something behind: a question, an image, a contradiction, something unresolved. You walk away from the gallery, cinema or concert and the work follows you home. Days later, you are still thinking about it. That is disturbance in its more profound sense. Not shock, but dislocation. Something in your understanding of the world has moved slightly.

Comfort Can Also Be Radical

There is another assumption worth challenging: that disturbance is intellectually serious while comfort is somehow sentimental. That is not necessarily true. Beauty can itself become resistance. Tenderness can become resistance. Creating something compassionate in a culture organised around cynicism can be radical. Writing sincerely about love in an age of irony can be radical. Making slow, contemplative art in an economy demanding constant stimulation can be radical.

Sometimes the most rebellious artistic gesture is refusing to scream. Art does not always have to destroy our comfort. Sometimes we desperately need somewhere to rest. Human beings cannot permanently exist in confrontation. We need beauty. We need humour. We need songs that make life temporarily bearable. We need paintings that give us somewhere to disappear. We need films that remind us why being alive can still be astonishing.

Comfort does not necessarily mean complacency. Sometimes comfort gives us the strength required to confront reality again tomorrow. There is no shame in needing art that offers sanctuary rather than confrontation. A song that helps somebody survive a terrible night has performed something meaningful even if it has challenged no political institution, questioned no social convention and transformed no cultural debate.

The Same Artwork Can Comfort and Disturb

Perhaps the most interesting weakness in the famous quotation is its division between two groups: the disturbed and the comfortable. Human beings rarely fit so neatly into either category. The comfortable person may secretly be suffering. The disturbed person may be comfortable in certain assumptions. Most of us are both. We contain wounds and prejudices simultaneously. We can be victims in one context and beneficiaries in another. We can desperately need compassion while also desperately needing challenge.

The same artwork can therefore perform both functions. A work about alienation might comfort someone who has spent their life feeling alienated while deeply disturbing someone who has never considered that experience. A work confronting social convention might liberate one viewer and anger another. A brutally honest song about addiction, grief, abuse or loneliness may be almost unbearable for one listener and deeply consoling for another.

Art does not control its destination. Once released into the world, it encounters millions of private histories. Every spectator brings something with them: their childhood, politics, loves, fears, losses, desires, shame and memories. Perhaps Wilde was closer to this idea than it initially appears. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, he writes that it is the spectator, rather than life, that art really mirrors. We never encounter an artwork entirely on its own terms. We encounter ourselves through it.

Art Should Not Tell Us What to Think

This is where art differs from propaganda. Propaganda wants certainty. It already knows the answer. Its purpose is to move the audience towards a predetermined conclusion. Great art is often more dangerous because it allows uncertainty to survive. It asks questions without necessarily answering them. It permits contradiction. A character can be sympathetic and monstrous. Love can be beautiful and destructive. Freedom can be exhilarating and terrifying. A person can be victim and perpetrator. Human beings can contain tenderness and cruelty simultaneously.

Life refuses simplicity, and the greatest art often refuses it too. That refusal matters increasingly in a culture that rewards immediate judgment. We are encouraged constantly to decide: good or bad, problematic or acceptable, hero or villain, right side or wrong side. Complexity is difficult to compress into a headline, social-media post or thirty-second video. Art can resist that compression because it can leave the question unanswered.

Art can therefore create a rare space where judgment is temporarily suspended. Instead of asking, What am I supposed to think about this?, we can ask, Why does this make me feel this way? The second question is infinitely more interesting because it turns the encounter with art inward. It requires us not merely to judge the artwork but to examine ourselves.

Art as an Encounter With Another Human Being

Perhaps we place too much pressure on art when we demand that it change the world. A painting cannot legislate. A novel cannot feed someone. A song cannot end a war. A film cannot abolish suffering. But art can alter consciousness, and consciousness determines how human beings encounter the world. Art allows us, temporarily, to enter another person’s interior life.

That experience does not guarantee empathy. Art has no magical moral power. Someone can read the greatest literature ever written and remain cruel. Someone can spend their life surrounded by beautiful paintings without becoming a better human being. We should be suspicious of romantic claims that culture automatically civilises us. History gives us far too much evidence to the contrary.

But the possibility remains. For a moment, the boundaries of the self become porous. Someone else’s grief becomes imaginable. Someone else’s desire becomes recognisable. Someone else’s loneliness resembles our own. Art does not necessarily tell us what conclusion to reach from that encounter. Its achievement may simply be that the encounter happened at all.

This may also explain why those seeking control have so often been suspicious of artists. Not because every artist is a revolutionary. Most are not. But art creates imaginative possibilities. It suggests that reality could be perceived differently. It allows somebody to describe the world in language other than the official language. Power is often most comfortable when reality appears inevitable. Imagination whispers that it might not be.

So, Should Art Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable?

Yes, but also no. Art can comfort the disturbed. It can tell the lonely that somebody else has been lonely. It can give language to trauma, preserve memory, transform grief into beauty and make unbearable experiences temporarily bearable. Art can also disturb the comfortable. It can expose hypocrisy, confront prejudice, reveal suffering hidden behind statistics, ridicule authority and challenge the stories societies tell about themselves.

But art must retain the freedom to do neither. It must be allowed to be beautiful, ugly, pointless, funny, erotic, difficult, quiet, self-indulgent, spiritual, absurd, political, apolitical, profound, trivial and even unsuccessful. The freedom to create includes the freedom not to fulfil somebody else’s definition of what art ought to accomplish.

Perhaps, then, we should change the famous sentence. Not: Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. But: Art should be free enough to do both. The distinction matters. The first statement gives art an instruction. The second protects its possibility.

And perhaps the greatest works eventually perform both functions anyway. They find us when something inside us has broken and whisper that someone else has stood in this darkness. Then, years later, we encounter the same work again. We have changed. Our circumstances have changed. This time the artwork does not console us. It unsettles us. It exposes something we had stopped questioning.

That may be the strange, enduring power of art. It does not merely decorate our lives; it accompanies us through them. Sometimes it places a hand on our shoulder. Sometimes it grabs us by the collar. Sometimes it simply stands silently before us and waits. And in that encounter between artist, artwork and audience, we may briefly see something we had forgotten how to see: the world, another human being, or ourselves.

Sources & Further Reading

• Cesar A. Cruz — “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” The Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival explicitly attributes the quotation to educator and activist Cesar A. Cruz and used it as the basis of its 2025 Comfort & Disturb theme.
  Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival — Comfort & Disturb

• Oscar Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891). The Preface contains Wilde’s declarations that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” that the spectator is what art really mirrors, and his famous concluding statement, “All art is quite useless.” These provide the foundation for the essay’s discussion of aestheticism and art existing independently of moral usefulness.
  The Picture of Dorian Gray — Preface

• Nina Simone — on the artist’s responsibility to reflect society. Simone repeatedly argued that an artist should respond to the historical circumstances in which they live. Her official site preserves an interview in which she describes the artist’s function, in her view, as reflecting the times and expressing things that millions of others cannot.
  Official Nina Simone — Legacy and Interviews

• Nina Simone — What Happened, Miss Simone? Archival interview footage also records Simone saying that she chose to reflect the times and situations in which she found herself and regarded this as her duty as an artist.
  Vanity Fair — Nina Simone on the Civil Rights Movement

• Finley Peter Dunne — Observations by Mr. Dooley. The older formulation behind the modern phrase appears in Dunne’s satirical writing about newspapers: “comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable.” Quote Investigator traces the expression to Dunne’s 1902 newspaper column and explains how variations developed subsequently.
  Quote Investigator — History of “Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable”

• Mental Health Foundation — Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival 2025. Useful contemporary evidence for the essay’s argument about art simultaneously providing consolation and challenging prejudice. The festival described Comfort and Disturb as reflecting its commitment both to confronting mental-health stigma and allowing people to tell their own stories.
  Mental Health Foundation — Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival 2025

One correction to the essay: the historical connection to Finley Peter Dunne should be presented as an important precursor, not necessarily as a direct lineage to Cruz's wording. The evidence securely establishes Dunne's 1902 formulation and shows that numerous variants developed later, while the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival explicitly attributes the modern art formulation to Cesar A. Cruz.