Some tools have many potential uses. Some tools have singular uses.
Like all trends, change didn’t happen instantaneously, and it didn’t appear everywhere in equal measures. With European industrialized nations gripped by violent seizures during the early 20th century, artists found themselves caught in a quandary. When romantic inspirations of la belle époque crashed into muddy World War One trenches, water lilies and wavy cypress trees simply didn’t flourish on easels they way they had only a few decades prior. The beginning of the war provoked the same thing that all emotionally wrenching events provoke: disbelief. Surely this would not, could not last. Surely rational minds would find a way to set things back they way they were.
History shows us that rational minds often do not win the day. The worst expressions of humanity proved yet again to be a self perpetuating engine. In the span of just a few years, so much promise at the end of the 19th caught fire and disappeared.
Art responds to everything. To be clear, those responses don’t happen without the direct expressions of actual people—artists— doing creative work. In a broader sense, however, it is art itself that responds. After hundreds of thousands, then millions of casualties literally piled up around Europe, art underwent something of its own responsive seizure. If the modern world had, as it appeared to many, abandoned civility in favor of brutality, previous pursuits of aestheticism made very little sense anymore. In fact, it was this collective lack of sense, so to speak, that propelled the inevitable response, namely a repudiation of order, beauty, and rational thinking when artists approached new creative works. Wrenched by the pain and existential futility that comes from feeling incapable of forestalling a looming darkness, the art world turned inside out and gave rise to Dada. In other words, when sense didn’t make sense anymore, the response was to stop making sense.
Now, a hundred years in the future, we’re still in the same place.
Despite what religions tell us, and elementary school teachers say in reading circles, and our moms and dads whisper when they tuck us in, people simply do not seem to be very good at caring for other people. Some? Sure, and often for loved ones in families and small communities. But taken over time, the evidence suggests otherwise. School boards can’t agree on what constitutes basic civic lessons, let alone cultivate more complex ethical frameworks for students. Political spaces have largely degenerated into useless scrums, more interested in winning fights than in actually solving hard challenges. A large and accelerating number of children live in poverty , something Mahatma Gandhi once described as “the worst form of violence”.
The spiral travels downward. When civility fails, humanity degenerates to other means. Once again the world finds itself at war. Objectively one has to wonder if war, or at least some active expression of belligerence, is our typical condition. Perhaps we should raise eyebrows in mild surprise when peaceful times catch hold. Today we see Ukraine and the Middle East ablaze, warships cruising perilously close to each other off the coast of Taiwan, and North Korea endlessly sharpening its sword. Mexico shudders from corruption and crime; Somalia and Yemen hardly function at all; oppressive, authoritarian rulers are on the rise worldwide. I haven’t even touched the dozens of acrimonious mosh pits tearing at the seams of the United States. Is it even worth mentioning the hard, parallel reality that despite human suffering brought about by widespread political unrest, the lack of leadership to forestall accelerating climate change threatens hundreds of millions of people, with no end in sight?
Many have no clue and no care, endlessly chasing micro-hits of dopamine on Tik-Tok.
How should art respond?
Review the question before you answer. It’s not how should WE respond, but how should ART respond? The question itself presents peril. Idealists may think that art in its various forms can function as remedy for chaos and pain. The rise of Dada in the early 20th century suggests otherwise. The peril here is that when ideologues try to use creative work as a mechanism for political or social coercion, the work instantly corrupts itself. Political forces have always used creative enterprise as a means of influence, but in its most trenchant expressions, art speaks for itself as a reaction to the world much more evocatively than when it’s wielded as an instrument of power.
There has been chaos and pain forever, and art forever, too. Most of history has been hard for people, given traditionally short life spans, a paucity of political motivation to sustain anyone’s wellbeing, and the proven proclivity for an ambitious few to dominate the majority. No matter how cool they may appear in the pages of picture books, the great ancient civilizations were the product of expendable humanity as much as the product of extraordinary ingenuity. It’s vital to remember that creative works do not require ethical underpinnings. Art simply responds. Art emerges inevitably because people cannot help but invent expressive responses to what they see and feel. Art helps organize ideas, even if those ideas are dark.
Lot of darkness looms these days. It feels as if this is an inflection moment in humanity’s trajectory through time. Amplified by our technological distractions, we have lost the balance between action and reaction, sometimes acting without care for the implications, sometimes reacting to events before considering the consequences. That is to say, the modern world has enabled individuals, communities, and countries to do a whole lot of stuff before we’ve even decided if that stuff makes sense to do in the first place. (Generalized Artificial Intelligence, anyone?) In Part II of this series next month, I’ll explore some of those reactions, and propose how we might re-consider the role of creative works not only as means of reflection, or escapes from day-to-day challenges, but essential ballast to help steady ourselves as we struggle to find our way through what feel like endless self-imposed storms.
Next month, I’ll publish Part II of this series. It’s called LEVERAGE, and it hits the ‘net on December 4. Then I’ll wrap up the series on Monday, January 1 with the final installment entitled REGRESSION. Mark your calendar for appointment reading! As a reminder, FASTER THAN LIGHT (this blog, my friends) publishes on the first Monday of every month.