No more questions

A few months ago, a thought popped into my head that I haven’t been able to shake. “What happens to art when we have more answers than questions?”

I think it was around the time of the New Jersey drone swarms, and there was a collective feeling that we were on the verge of the disclosure of some well-protected knowledge about the world.

Theories abounded from the more mundane — unknown military technologies, potential threats from a state actor — to the fanciful — visitors from outer-space or interdimensional travelers.

I always think about current events in terms of how they will affect my business and my clients, and, whatever those lights were, the potentially paradigm-shifting changes to our understanding of reality made me pause and think about the implications for artists.

If there comes a time when the world lacks mystery, when we have the answers to all of our biggest questions about ourselves and our existence, how does art fit in? What is it about the work that artists do that makes it important, even in that situation?

There may never come a time when our knowledge exceeds our ignorance, but it begs the question, “What is art? Why should we care? What difference does it make?”

Image: X / © DougSpac

If we were to know everything about the universe and our place in it tomorrow, I think the biggest loser in that calculation would actually be the prevailing expectation that artists have answers to questions about every current social, sexual or political conflict facing us today.

This is a popular attitude among people who sell and exhibit art. In their framing, artists are seen as world builders, creators of alternative formulations of structures that have become outdated. Artists lead culture into the future.

There is an expectation that art operates at the edge of human comprehension and perception, in the space between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown. Artists are prophets, in a way, that speak to us in a language we don’t completely understand to tell us things we need to know about our futures. Art becomes a window into new, alternative realities. If, hypothetically, we already knew everything, that wouldn’t be entirely necessary.

Image: Unsplash / © Alex Shuper

The truth is a little more complicated. Art is powerful for the way it transmutes ideas, either old and new, into objects. The way material and form hold concepts. As art, ideas circulate in new contexts that give shape to the immaterial world of ideas.

The art is not simply the idea. It’s the way the idea lives and breathes in the world. Works of art butt up against their contextual framing and reveal something that already exists.

There’s a Thomas J. Price sculpture in the middle of Times Square that recently came to the attention of the online Right. Grounded in the Stars is a sculptural representation of a fictional person.

A bronze figure of a black woman stands in a casual posture with her hands on her hips and her left knee slightly bent. The artist describes the work as “my little gesture to present an opportunity for people to question their assumptions about the world we live in.”

In contrast to the sculpture of Father Francis P. Duffy in Times Square, Grounded in the Stars depicts no one specific. Price’s work undercuts our expectations for who and what bronze sculptures are meant to immortalize.

It doesn’t tell us what to think or how to treat public monuments, but it does challenge the idea that only historical figures are worthy of memorialization in bronze.

Grounded in the Stars isn’t a call to start erecting monuments to nondescript black women around our cities —that would be normative finger-wagging — but the response to the work sort of proves the artist’s point.

Image: Father Francis P. Duffy © pbernardon

People on X have been talking about Grounded in the Stars quite a bit today, scandalized for various reasons by its depiction of, as one user disparagingly described her, “an obese and ugly black woman.” They went on to say, “a society that once celebrated beauty and gods now puts up monuments to dysfunction[.] the worship of the ugly is the most honest expression of our time.”

Another X user described the work as a “normalisation of our demoralisation.”

Infamous right-wing commentator Matt Walsh criticized it saying, “They tear down statues of American heroes and replace them with statues of random obese black women. That’s because the Left has no historical heroes.”

But these reactions miss the point.. The work isn’t meant to dictate where society should go. It reflects back onto society the nature of our monuments, our statues, how we tell our history to ourselves.

Artists aren’t seers. It isn’t their responsibility to change culture or move society in new directions. Their work is an expression of human consciousness materialized in whatever medium they choose.

Art’s more subtle power resides at that intersection between idea and form. It shows rather than tells. It reflects better than it opens windows onto new worlds.

That’s not to say art has no social value — but its power isn’t in charting a course forward. It’s in revealing where we already are, from an angle we hadn’t yet considered.

In that context, there is no end to human ingenuity and creativity. Come what may in the realm of human self-knowledge, AI consciousness or breaking out of the simulation, art will always be valuable.