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Art Keeps Us Younger

A year younger is the finding. What the body does with that year is the question.

A recent study followed adults across years of their lives, watching for the small biological changes that mark the passing of time. The ones who spent time with art at least once a week aged more slowly than those who did not, about a year younger by the markers researchers track in DNA and overall health. The comparison the scientists reach for is exercise. A weekly workout, a weekly painting, and the body apparently does not draw a hard line between them.

That is what the study found. The harder question is what the year is for.

Pablo Casals was ninety-three when someone asked why he still practiced the cello six hours a day. "Because I think I am making progress," he said. He had already answered the question without needing the science. The year is for progress, in whatever quiet form progress takes when a person is ninety-three and the world has stopped asking much of them. The body keeps its own records, remembering when it has been still and curious, when it has been moved, when it has been allowed to wander somewhere it could not be measured.

The science compares art to exercise. The body knows the comparison is incomplete. Some progress is made on a treadmill. Some is made in a room with a painting in it. Some is made among other people who are also looking, also noticing, also recognizing one another from the last time they stood in front of something together.

The Sasse was not built around a study. It was built around something quieter, the notion that a person should be able to walk in and find a love story already waiting to begin. Love stories of that kind do not develop in isolation. They develop in rooms, on Sunday mornings, between people who happen to be looking at the same thing at the same time. The exhibitions, the catalogs that stay on shelves long after the show comes down, the Sunday mornings when a few words and an image arrive in an inbox, are all the same practice, in different forms. A practice, in the way Casals practiced.
A year lived this way fills with specific things. Someone you saw last month and recognize again at the next opening. A painting you came back to a second time because something in it would not let you alone. A catalog opened on a kitchen table in winter, the way a poem is opened. A Sunday morning note that quietly enters the day before the day has decided what it will be.

That is what the body does with an extra year. It spends it. On showing up. On staying curious. On the company of other people who notice. On the slow patient progress of becoming, at any age, a little more alive than the day before.
Casals at ninety-three knew this. He knew there is always progress being made.

Forging Art & Legacy | Vartan Ohanian | Apr 2026 Exhibit

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