How Artists Reflect the Collective Human Soul

Furthermore, artists often serve as the chroniclers of their time, capturing the zeitgeist in a way that history books never can. They bottle the atmosphere of an era—the sounds, the smells, the anxieties, and the hopes—and preserve them for eternity. To remember a great artist is to remember a specific moment in our own history or the history of the world. They become the anchors for our nostalgia, tethering us to the versions of ourselves that existed when we first experienced their work. We keep them in our hearts because losing them would feel like losing a piece of our own past; they are the soundtrack to our youth and the visual language of our most formative experiences.