Meditative art

Not The Meditative Arts—I’m talking about art, properly. Painting, singing, acting, writing, designing.
I think as far as meditation goes there are two ways to think about art: creation and experience.
Creation of art can be quite meditative, especially if one has the training and intention to create proper art (as distinguished from craft or entertainment—a distinction best left for another post). This isn’t to say everyone has to paint a masterpiece or write a Pulitzer-worthy poem to create art that is meditative. It is instead an acknowledgment of the overlapping skills required and states experienced in both art creation and meditation.
There is a mindfulness and purposefulness required of the act of creation, such that the act is essentially meditative on its own. Think about a meditation lesson where you focus on the skin of your fingertips, where the skin ends and the space around you begins. Now add clay to that space, and experiencing the texture and temperature of the clay as something—you’re not quite sure what—guides your fingers to bend and shape the clay. Putting your awareness at your fingertips in this way is automatically mindfulness training, and it is necessary to making an object of beauty, the real goal or art as far as it can be boiled down into a statement. (see the last lines of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” for QED)
But art can be meditative from an experiential perspective, too. Take the Grecian urn and it’s lessons, what it is trying to communicate to us through space and time from the person who created it, a person no doubt very much like ourselves. I think about the thesis of a work of art being meditative in the way i think about the Koan tradition, where phrases of wisdom and lines of coded thought are repeated over and over in the meditator’s mind. The point of the Koans seems two-fold to me: giving the mind something to do while meditating and also revealing, often subtly, greater wisdom and understanding.
So think about visiting a museum and contemplating and appreciating works of art from one artist or many. You walk around pondering each piece and eventually a perspective builds and before you know it, it’s three hours later and the docents are telling you it’s time to leave.
Whether as experience or creation, art has a lot to offer the meditator. And let’s not forget the real value: Vitality.