Art Should Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable

I recently stumbled upon a beautiful quote from Cesar A. Cruz that I just wanted to ponder.

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”

Cruz’s quote is both provocative and elusive, a tidy aphorism masking a deeper tension. It implies a dual responsibility for art: to console those in pain while challenging those at ease. But who decides which group we belong to? What comforts one person might deeply unsettle another, and vice versa.

The beauty of Cruz’s idea is that it resists easy answers. Comfort isn’t inherently weak; it can heal. Discomfort isn’t automatically righteous; it can harm. Art lives in this paradox, in the liminal space where consolation and confrontation coexist. Cruz’s words don’t prescribe solutions, they challenge us to sit with the ambiguity, to feel both the sting and the salve of what art can do. That’s its power: to disturb us into wakefulness, but also to cradle us when we need it most.