It’s art fair season! As you’re strolling through an art festival on a lovely summer day, what pieces should you bring home? Which ones will have the most positive effects on your life?

For our purposes today, let’s describe art as paintings, photographs, sculptures, etc., that we choose to surround ourselves with because we like to look at them—and our “art” can be full-size or reduced to fit on a postcard, original, or a reproduction. For our current discussion, we’ll ignore audio art (like music), kinesthetic art (such as dance), literature, and drama, etc. We’ll be focusing on the sorts of stuff you might encounter on display in the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or your local art gallery.

The reason that most of us add art to our world is that doing so gives us a big psychological push toward wellbeing, at least when we get to select it (Chatterjee, 2013).

Choosing art is a way we can exercise some control over our lives and just doing that gives us a more positive mindset to meet the world and helps our brains work more effectively, regularly improving our cognitive performance (Dutton, 2009).

Via art, we can also signal to anyone who visits our home or wanders by our workspace what we value about ourselves, which might be that we’re good at our jobs, or a member of a particular group, or something else entirely. When we send these signals, we remind........

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