We (must) create art in the apocalypse!

Chapter 21 is a lesson in the point of it all

This is Chapter 21. In the mad mix, we must live fully and creatively to restore sanity. Art is not an indulgence, it steers us.

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CREATE

“Then what would we be fighting for?”

- Winston Churchill, when asked to cut funding for the arts to help the war effort.

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“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”

- James Baldwin

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During the Paris Olympics, Google aired a commercial for their Chat GPT competitor product Gemini. It featured a Dad and his daughter using the AI chatbot to write a fan letter to the little girl’s favourite athlete. There’s a good chance it doesn’t ring bells. That’s because Google had to pull the ad almost immediately following widespread backlash. Said one media professor, it was “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.”¹

It would appear a polished simulacra of a child’s awkward and raw gesture crosses some kind of “uncanny valley” boundary for many of us. Of course it does! The beauty of a letter written by a kid lies precisely in all the things that large language models (LLMs) remove and “fix”. I think when we witness this kind of creepy corner-cutting we also become aware of other ramifications of our hell-bent techno-trajectory, like - in this case - how it denies a child the important creative act of representing their feelings out in the world, of reaching both inwards and outwards to communicate love and awe for their heroine. That Google would think that they could, and should, fuck with something so sacred is viscerally alarming, right?

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This anecdote brings me an odd hope (the tangible, helpful kind). Something in us knows that the freedom to create is fundamental to our humanity. Without it, who are we? Without it, how do we survive? Or, per Winston Churchill, without it, what are we fighting for?

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Because creative types go deep and necessarily ask sensitive questions, there are a lot of creative people in this community. And by virtue of this, the question has been raised many times in the comments thread:

Is it appropriate that we be making art when the world around us is suffering and disintegrating?

It can seem indulgent in these times to be engaging in the creative process and not, say, picking up plastic on the beach. But my answer is an unequivocal, yes! It’s entirely appropriate, especially as we create our islands of sanity. Indeed, we must create art in the apocalypse.

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You see, art, whether it’s poetry, music, painting or literature, gets us paying attention. It cuts through the distraction and chaos that is taking down democracy and polarising us. As the poet Teju Cole told Krista Tippett on her On Being podcast, the role of the artist is “to get people to concentrate more”. He then added this glorious line, a line that demonstrates its point as it is being read:

“The artist raises a palm as if to say hush and listen and let’s be still.”

The other day I was listening to professor and author Ta-Nehisi Coates talk to Kara Swisher on her podcast about the role of books and writers. “They should haunt us,” he said. Kafka, similarly, wrote that books are “the axe for the frozen sea within us”. Both Coates and Kafka are pointing to something that I very much believe: Art exists, and must exist, to shake us awake and into engagement; it should enliven us to take responsibility for our existence.

I think it mostly does this by making us work. You can’t be passive with a book or a poem (as opposed to a Youtube video); you can’t merely - and numbly - consume art. You have to rise to, and meet, the disruption. Once we do, we are left to reckon in the stillness between the words, or between the notes of a musical score, or between brushstrokes. This is true for both the artist and the audience.

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A number of thinkers have also declared art a necessary tool for keeping in check the excess and volatility that surfaces when we’re “between worlds”, or when we’re in a period of disruption. The late 18th Century philosopher Fredrich Schiller wrote that cultivating aesthetic education might have tempered some of the fury of “The Reign of Terror” that took hold after the French Revolution. The gist of his theory (and others’ since) is that engaging in art sees us nurture our emotional responses and attention and this becomes a tempering force against the “fervour of ideology”.

I look around the world at the moment. It’s the creatives, not the corporate lawyers nor the accountants, who are bravely taking a stand on social platforms, expressing the collective’s outrage. They are getting cancelled for speaking out on the plight of the Palestinians, they are surfacing controversial debates, they front the climate protests.

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Indeed, we have always made art in super tricky, liminal times. In 1939, just after the UK joined the war, C.S Lewis gave a sermon, later published as Learning in Wartime, that attempted to answer the same question I am here. Lewis argued that a war was no reason to put off creating. To the contrary:

“[Humans] propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature [my itals].”

This era that Lewis wrote in produced existentialism. Confucius’s teachings and Sun Tzu’s Art of War were created during China’s “Warring States” period. And the turbulent Axial age brought us all those philosophical, literary and spiritual isms - Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, scepticism, nihilism, Taoism, Confucianism and Sophism.

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The Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa once said that creativity emerges when there’s no way out.

“Everything gets clear when you’re cornered.”

Doesn’t it just.

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But I think the existential imperative to create goes deeper than just providing perspective and calm.

When a world starts to die, when the centre shows signs of no longer holding, it’s the artist who first notices the shift in the Zeitgeist. Their sensitivity and refined observation skills “smell” the emerging discontent, they can feel the proverbial pot start to warm. Invariably they are mocked, passed off as neurotic or eccentric or recalcitrant (or, these days, cancelled). But they hold. They can’t unsee or unfeel things. And, such is their original urge to express, they must continue to offer up what they’re seeing and sound the clarion call, through metaphor, visual representations and the like. Shit is getting real, people! This is what comes next!

At the same time, artists will start to reach beyond the darkness. Artists are drawn by light and they will go find it (like the Impressionists did in the wake of the French Revolution), mostly because their sanity demands it. When you’re an early adopter to the reality of a collapsing “old world” you have to create the way forward yourself, you must dare to dream up “the something better”.

The left-brained dark forces are destroying things, right-brain creators must go the other way. And so artists also lay the foundations for the new world that is to come. They bring into being those ideas that will need to be lying around!

We can cast our minds back to that Venn diagram I mocked up to illustrate the liminal, or “between worlds”, space we find ourselves in now. This is the natural habitat of artists. This is where they come into their own.

Following the election of George W. Bush in 2004, writer and artist Toni Morrison was despairing about the result with a fellow artist friend². She tells him she’s about to give up, but he interrupts her, “No, no , no this is precisely the time when artists go to work.”

When I first read this little anecdote it occurred to me how vital it is that we do not silence or cancel artists. This is their role - to call out the uncomfortable stuff (whether it be genocides, apartheid, inequality, democratic collapse) and to make us uncomfortable enough that we are, too, shaken from the dying reality.
Creatives must be afforded the space and permission to do their work at the uncomfortable edges.

So, yes, we must make art amid the uncertainty and despair because we have a new world that has to be created!
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But let’s come back to Google’s Gemini.

As a broad observation, it is absurd and so-so wrong that the tech bros get to impose their life-shifting, creepy and destructive wares on us with no consultation, no asking if it’s what we want, no government oversight. And in some ways, Google’s misstep lay in actually giving us a head’s up on what they were rolling out, on large screens, providing us with the chance to actually see what’s going on. Normally we are denied such an opportunity.

Reflecting on the fall-out prompted an idea, a thesis of sorts. Let me know what you think of it…

We have spent much of the past 200 years lauding rationality, data accrual, precision, didacticism and other left-brained derangements At the same time we have diminished qualities like caring for others, stewardship, intuition, nobly “bearing” and wisdom. In effect, we’ve worked to define ourselves away from these so-called “soft skills”.

But from time to time we hit a Google Gemini ad. Or a book like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Or Apple’s Vision Pro. Or we wake up to the full implications of “singularity” and transhumanism. And we baulk! We suddenly realise that a data-drenched robot is not us. A letter from an LLM is not us. We find ourselves desperate to defend our humanity against such incursions. And to do so we go searching for what makes us stand apart from the robots and the AI simulacra, what makes us uniquely, beautifully, wonderfully human. And of course, it’s all those “soft-skills” that we’d rejected for so long that do so. It’s care and love that makes us us. It’s our compassion and empathy, and our right-brained wisdom. And it’s our ability to create and make art.

AI will never be able to take over because of art. AI tries to make art by combining data. Then perfecting it. It’s advanced mimcry. But humans create art by combining data with experience, with emotions, with notions of awe and sublimity, and with our relationships, and in beautifully imperfect ways.

I close my thesis with this: We also need to make art to remind us of what it is to be human.

Sarah xx

Audio version:

1. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have all delayed or rolled back AI products over the past two years after concerns about how the tools worked.

2. She shares this story in her essay “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear”.