What’s the use of art?
It’s a question I’ve found myself returning to often lately. In the face of so much turbulence and suffering in the world — ecological collapse, conflict, political division, and personal loss — making art can, at times, feel almost indulgent. Shouldn’t I be doing something more useful? More urgent? More practical?
And yet, again and again, I find myself drawn back to the studio, believing that what I do there somehow matters. I couldn’t quite articulate why — until last week, when I listened to a beautiful conversation between Krista Tippett and the composer Mohammed Fairouz on the On Being podcast. I kept finding myself smiling and thinking: Yes!
Fairouz said that he believes “music and poetry, the arts, do something that is very, very special in that they allow us access to a rarefied space — a sacred space, almost. They take us beyond the 9/11s, beyond the Tahrir Squares, beyond Facebook and Twitter and all of this stuff. They allow us to reach beyond the day to day. They allow us to reach beyond the muddled present, and in a way to touch something that is timeless and eternal. And I think that is the essence of what we do — what we’re privileged to do as artists.”
For me (and perhaps rather surprisingly) poetry often does that more powerfully than painting. Over recent years, I’ve taken to learning poems by heart, and have found it to be a deeply nourishing practice. It was moving to hear Fairouz say that “memorizing poetry is absolutely vital… [as it] gives us the poetic tools that one needs to get through life.” That has certainly been my experience. Poetry has been a significant source of hope and clarity for me. In the studio, I seek to channel those energies and emotions back into my painting, to capture something of the stillness, vision, and transcendence that poetry awakens in me.
I believe painting, like gratitude, is an act of hope. Fairouz articulates this beautifully when he speaks of his album Follow Poet, and how the many people involved in its creation were united by a belief in something larger than themselves. They believed that “someone who listens to it may be moved. It may affect them. It may move them to do something good in their day, or in their hour, or in their life… [even] if it’s a very small percentage of people, it is still better than sitting around and doing nothing.”
That same spirit is captured in the words of Toni Morrison, who once said:
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
‘Follow Poet’ begins with a recording of John F. Kennedy’s speech at Amherst College in 1963, honouring the poet Robert Frost and the role of the artist in society. Some lines from that speech touched me deeply. It is an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful articulation of his vision:
“When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment…”
“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth… In a free society, art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But in a democratic society, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself — and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man — the fate of having ‘nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.’”
That’s why, despite everything, I keep painting. Why I keep returning to the studio in the face of fear and doubt. Because I believe that art can open us to the beauty and sorrow of the world. Because it can keep us tender. Because it can help us remember what it is to be truly human. And perhaps, in its own quiet way, it can help keep alive both gratitude for where we’ve come from, and hope for where we might yet go.
