The paper proposes that encounters with art works are a particularly productive means of enhancing an individual’s life satisfaction and well-being as the effects of art reach several different levels of consciousness directly. The paper undertakes an enquiry into the way in which the experience of art might contribute to or enhance the quality of life of both artists and audience members. In its pursuit of clarification of the issues that art raises with respect to its value to the quality of life the paper draws both on the author’s practice as a choreographic artist, and on insights gleaned from philosophy and neuroscience in relation to that practice. The relevance of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical concepts of ‘sensation’ and ‘affect’ to the experience of art is explored, as is contemporary neuroscientific research into the experience of viewing or listening to art works, and its reclaiming of the Classical Greek notion of the role of imitation in the arts.