On the Importance of Art
By Marcus Harrison Green
If you have the urge to unleash a primal scream due to the state of the world, please count yourself in good company. Every day news headlines vomit up some fresh misery leaving many of us bewildered. Compiled together it can all be overwhelming, and nearly impossible to process everything currently transpiring without teetering near hopelessness.
Like many, I’ve drifted close to the belief that there’s nothing to be done, right now, other than to grin and bear the grim reality that appears to await us. Ignorance, hatred, and bigotry seem to be running up the score in the game of life.
What’s to be done when it seems like far too many people we inhabit a country with are either apathetic or craven?
Make art. Make beauty. Create.
Our world contains so much ugliness and vileness; so much horror in the ways we dehumanize each other, particularly the most vulnerable and disadvantaged among us. My imagination has spent more time than I care to admit ruminating on the cruelty and demonization that will potentially befall people and communities I love and am allied with after November’s election. It’s hard not to ruminate on the malice that has already befallen them.
This is why this moment calls for our artists, our writers, and our creators to bring forth work that shakes us from despair, reminds us that beauty is present, and triggers our imaginations to dream beyond what is present. It satiates the human need to be loved, to be seen, to be part of something larger than ourselves.
Great art allows us to process our pain and reminds us that life is better lived as active creators. Creating art provides the opportunity to challenge a vicious status quo and the cynicism that comes with accepting the future as inevitable, even when it is not.
A credit to the performance artist Marina Abramović for halting my fixation on life’s miseries, by distilling the importance of artists to their societies.
“We need to produce transformative art that changes the ideology of society whenever and wherever dangerous, hurtful ideology arises,” she’s credited as saying.
We have our work cut out for us. Best to get to it.