Art should disturb

It states a whole philosophy of art in one sentence. Good art should unsettle people who are too at ease with the world as it is, and console people who are already shaken by it. The design puts that double job on a shirt, so it reads as a manifesto in a studio and as a gentle warning in a gallery.

The line is most often credited to the poet and educator Cesar A. Cruz. It adapts a much older saying about newspapers, so the idea is older than the art version, and you will also find it swapped around as art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.

From the American humorist Finley Peter Dunne. In a 1902 Mr. Dooley column on newspaper publicity, his fictional Chicago barkeeper says the newspaper “comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable”, collected in Observations by Mr. Dooley. Dunne meant it ironically – the paper meddles in everything – but the short form became a sincere motto of journalism and later of art.

There is no single answer. Plato worried that art imitates mere appearances and stirs up passions, Aristotle saw it as a way to understand human action and purge emotions, Kant linked beauty to disinterested pleasure, Tolstoy defined art as passing on feelings, and many 20th-century thinkers stressed its power to criticise society. The design sides with the last group without forgetting consolation.

In the Poetics (around 335 BC) Aristotle says tragedy, by arousing pity and fear, brings about the catharsis of such emotions. Scholars still debate whether he meant a purging, a purification or a clarification of feeling. Either way, it is the classic argument that being disturbed by art can leave us better off.

In Book X of the Republic, Plato argues that poets and painters copy appearances, which are themselves copies of the Forms, so their work stands at three removes from truth. Worse, poetry feeds the emotions that reason should govern. He allows hymns to the gods and praise of good people, and invites poetry to defend itself in argument.

In What Is Art? (1897) Leo Tolstoy rejects beauty as the measure of art. Real art, he argues, is an activity by which one person consciously passes on feelings they have lived through so that others are infected by them. He judged much of the elite art of his day as counterfeit and valued art that unites people – a demanding, still debated theory.

Yes. It suits painters, writers, musicians, actors, curators, art and design students, and teachers who ask their classes what art is for. It is a statement they can wear to the studio or the seminar, and a quiet reminder of why they make difficult work.

The design comes as a unisex classic T-shirt, a women’s T-shirt, a sweatshirt, a premium hoodie, a mug and a sticker – so it works on the body, on the desk next to the sketchbook or on a laptop lid.