Who is Bad Art Friend? And why I got vaccinated...
i detailed my reasons on Instagram and it went wild (in a good way, which is nice)
Here in Sydney, Australia, we have just come out of a long lockdown, 106 days. Freedom, travel, fear and sovereignty are themes circulating. I reckon I’ll explore a few of these with you today.
I’ve invited you to chime in on fashion returns below in the comments and have asked my mates at Spell and Ginger & Smart to answer anything that comes up.
One thought that has just come to me as I hover my forefinger over “publisher” on a day that has struck me as quite cranky, is this old favourite: Do you want to be right or to love? It’s a beautiful question, right? We can always pause and ask it amid the crankiness.
Freedom is a practice
and getting vaccinated is one such way
I did an IG Live this week on the reasons why I got the Covid vaccination.
It attracted 200,000 views (and counting) and feedback from around the world (Juliette Lewis, NBC’s Carson Daly and a former Manchester United star who contacted me and we got to chatting whiskey in my DMs for a bit).
I consciously didn’t go down the “your science v my science” rabbit hole. I didn’t go near “rights” or side effects (which I did in fact experience).
Nope. My rationale is this:
The vaccine – as undesirable and imperfect as it is - is the only viable option on the table for giving young people back their lives, and for ensuring the disadvantaged do not experience further pain (health workers pushed to brinks, the sick denied access to over-stretched hospitals, etc). Personally, I’d rather not have to take it but…
We, as a globe, are being asked to step beyond our self-interest, our uninspiring individualism and “sovereignty” and to attend to something greater, the collective. For most of us, it’s the first time we’ve been asked to do so. And IMO this is a privilege.
Vax bitching and catastrophising are distracting us all from the more pressing issue – the climate crisis. Let’s sort Covid swiftly and move on to the bigger calamity, again in the spirit of being in service to something bigger (the planet, young people). Onwards!
I think the idea of rising in service to the collective struck a chord. It feels familiar and emotionally congruent with something we feel primally deep inside, yes? While at the same time, it’s also sadly unfamiliar. I think it piqued a longing, a nostalgia.
Throughout history, this is what the greatest leaders have done – delivered us to this congruence. They have dragged us from our self-obsession to the collective, something we don’t tend do on our own (because we are programmed mostly to veer toward self-interest), but require in order to survive. We don’t have fangs, horns, poison in our tails…we have only ever had an awesome ability to form a tribe and defend ourselves as a collective that can cooperate super smartly. So we laud leaders who can drive us to this cooperative collective vibe, and who can inspire us from our inherent selfishness with altruistic incentives, myths and storyline that rally us together. It’s a tension. And we need leaders who keep us dancing somewhere between the two drives.
Yuval Noah Harari covers this well in Sapiens and Rutger Bregman in Humankind.
The problem today is that we have swung so far to the individualism end of the scale. Such that to be asked to rise to service is seen as an affront. We see it as a complete violation of our sovereignty (whatever that really means), our rights (wherever they are laid out), instead of us a gift that can help us correct the tension, right the pendulum swing.
And this is because we have dispensed with good leaders and boundary makers…all in the name of this so called freedom and sovereignty. For the past 100 years or so, we have progressively wiped the “moral umpires and coaches”, as I call them, off the footy field of life, the noble Presidents and PMs, the interventionist State which ensured funding for hospitals and schools, and religious and community leaders who once blew the whistle on too much life-threatening selfishness and motivated us into en masse action. And. So. Individualism has been allowed to take over the whole damn game. Ergo the existential crises we now face. (Yep, I see Covid and the climate crisis and the wild political fragmentation fermenting around the world as the direct upshot of individualism and consumption left to run rampant.)
Which brings me to freedom.
We don’t love it.
We know it skews us too far to individualism, and this leaves us feeling precarious and dangerously out of balance. As James Baldwin wrote,
“I have met only a very few people — and most of these were not Americans — who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear.”
The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard defined anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom”. The general consensus from the research I’ve done is that the human brain doesn’t have the capacity to operate with infinite choice and options…we get overwhelmed, our amygdala then hijacks our neocortex and we freeze. Mostly we freeze into self-centered, go-nowhere acedia.
True freedom, to my mind, is to be found in the dance, in the art of navigating the tension between self-interest and our love and congruence with things that are bigger, whether it be the collective, the planet, God.
It requires reclaiming the language of nuance, of bravely mucking about in the grey, engaging in philosophical complexity and uncertainty.
It means steering away from the binary-talking leaders, toward those who are comfortable leading us through the grey, the uncertainty, our complex emotions, and away from our self-interest to “bigger”, to the wonderful storyline of our humanity. “I had a dream…”, “Ask not what your country can do for you…”, “We are only as strong as our weakest link…”
This is our great challenge as we face pandemics, epidemics, climate breakdown and more in coming years.
To this end…
I enjoyed this read about the “mind-set that’s tearing us apart – essentialising”. David Brooks argues that we need to both see the world as groups or types (we can’t let cancel culture go too far), but also as persons. Not either-or. Both. He writes that a hopeful future, “would mean constantly toggling back and forward between seeing groups and seeing people” - Yes, the tension dance.
And I took time to wrestle through this nuanced rundown of how rigidly talking in “generations” is factually unfounded.
I also listened to this brilliant Ezra Klein Show chat this week with poet and thinker Maggie Nelson. She argues,
Freedom is a practice.
As opposed to a one-time emancipatory event. You gotta lean into it, sweat it…not sit back and wait for it to be given out (which would be a very un-free way to go about things).
She also points out that much of modern life sees us choose unfreedom. We hand over our leisure hours, purchase power and choice to Amazon (this read argues Amazon Prime is the company’s most terrifying invention and warns us against signing up). We are slaves to fashion; private schooling; “you might like this” prompts on Netflix; and queues for the baked goods that someone else tells us are the best in town. We don’t want to engage our political rights…because it’s too hard.
We allow binary-talking leaders with no vision for our collective future to stay in power…but whinge when their binary approach locks us down.
It’s all very paradoxical.
And only practicing nuance and dancing and agency (within joy-making boundaries that prod us to rise, rise, rise to bigger, bigger, bigger), and artfully applying our moral compass to the collective, will see us wrestle our way to real freedom.
Write a letter to the future
a technique for corporates and groups
I came across a technique for connecting to the climate crisis and thought it could be a great exercise for anyone working to get climate reluctance engaged - writing a story about the climate to an unborn child (our own or otherwise).
The beauty of it – it can get us out of the theoretical and the arguing of facts, into a personal, felt realization.
“To write for a future generation means believing in it, believing that despite all the difficulties, humanity is something worth preserving, that we are still accountable to the people who will come after us, and that this responsibility can still induce people in the present to act with more courage.”
What happens when we return the blouse we didn’t really want?
nope, it doesn’t go back on the rack, waste averted
This article astonished me. Give it a read. I’ve asked my mates at Spell and Ginger & Smart to wade in and answer your questions in the comments.
“We can dispatch now with a common myth of modern shopping: The stuff you return probably isn’t restocked and sent back out to another hopeful owner…even if mailed-in products come back in pristine, unused condition—say, because you ordered two sizes of the same bra and the first one you tried on fit fine—the odds that things returned to a sorting facility will simply be transferred to that business’s inventory aren’t great, and in some cases, they’re virtually zero. Getting an item back into a company’s new-product sales stream, which is sometimes in a whole different state, can be logistically prohibitive. Some things, such as beauty products, underwear, and bathing suits, are destroyed for sanitary reasons, even if they appear to be unopened or unused.”
Lesson here: Be certain before you buy or don’t buy it at all.
A quote to reflect on
on travel… do we really want to plunge into it?
“Traveling is one of the saddest pleasures of life.”
— Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807)
Who is the Bad Art Friend?
one of those cult articles about something wonderfully granular
This is one of those articles everyone is talking about that sees a phenomenon become a meme.
Remember Cat Person, Blue Dress and Mansplainer?
Bad Art Friend encompasses a moral dilemma beyond all the complex ones we have to navigate at the moment. Enjoy the granularity.
I’ll leave it there.
Oh, and my next Wild with Sarah Wilson podcast guest is the just slightly mad philosopher and environmentalist Timothy Morton. I refer to Tim in my book - they (Tim’s preferred pronoun) coined the term “hyperobjects” - and they’re regarded as the most powerful figure in the contemporary art world. They have collaborated with Bjork, Jeff Bridges, Pharrell Williams, NASA as well as on Steve Coogan’s series The Trip to Italy.
Tim has written more than 250 essays on ecology, the ideological aspects of gastronomy, Talking Heads, Heidegger and concrete and we have a mad time chatting. They are also supremely kind and I can’t recall if I share this in my little wrap-up bit at the end…I think Tim invents all these ideas, goes to the edge, is generous to a fault and talks to randoms like me because they are simply yearning to connect closer and closer. My kind of human.
Yours In Practicing Freedom,
Sarah xx
Who is Bad Art Friend? And why I got vaccinated...
I spent an incalculable amount of time musing over Bad Art Friend instead of being a normal person last week. You're right, the issue is totally granular, but for me the main takeaway was about consent and ethics. Both the women profiled in that piece were playing two different games; I think there's a lot of value and poignancy in just asking for consent when somebody's story inspires me. It opens up a new conversation, invites a different order of creativity. Thanks Sarah!
Yes, yes, Sarah. Get vaccinated for the greater. For my elderly parents who will die if they got COVID. That was more than enough for me to do it. And love those of us who disagree and are sticking to their guns not getting vaccinated.
Individualism .. I'm reflecting a lot on this. The 'modern self' ... and we've lost the notion of 'companionship', journeying together through life with some folk where real vulnerability and love for the other exists so we accept and agree to disagree.
Lovely having you drop back into my inbox each week, dear Sarah.