Artists; the blessed and the cursed. The creators and destructors. The creativity which human beings have been blessed with is the symbol of our consciousness. Yet very often art is seen or treated as something unnecessary, a hobby. Other activities are more important than art: “You have to put food on the table first”; address our basic needs. Because what is the use of art? Well maybe in a world in crisis, art is what is most needed. Because the crisis that we are going through is a meaning crisis. Art is there to make sense of our world and help us connect; understand deeply though making something that has no other goal than to exist: such as life in itself.

So in a secular world where we have lost sacredness, art might seem the least urgent thing to do when your house is burning. But maybe we’ve got it wrong. When your house is burning what else should you do then art?

As some of you know, I am an artist and for a while I had fallen into the trap of the belief that other things were more important than practicing art, that I had to “grow up”. You gotta pay the bills; our world is in crisis; we need to heal, you have to create a new cultural infrastructure for this new world; the roof needs repairs; your child needs to eat. Everything seemed more important and urgent than making art. 

The wise one and heroes often have the appearance of a certain puritan look. Because “true freedom” and “happiness” does not look like Pete Doherty; of sex, drugs and rock’n'roll. Yet maybe the suffering of our artists is there to wake us up! Because often the sensibility of the artist makes him unable to function in our calcified world and shows us that our society is suffering from an illness of dualism, ego driven, separation, loss of sacredness, materiality, individualism .

The Three traps of Modern Illness of Art

Part of that illness is to see the world in a dualistic way. And for art it would be to see that creativity can exist beyond the dichotomy of the puritan Apollian priest and the Maenads of Bacchus. Like a tightrope walker stepping into the unknown complexity of the world; guided by the thirst for truth. The artist explores what it will mean to be tomorrow’s human beings.

One of the greatest traps for artists in navigating its way beyond modernity is the cancerous labyrinth of mirrors, disconnecting us from each other.  Lost in our reflections; drowning in our ego, meeting the fate of narcissus. The remedy to narcissus is to find our reflection in the eyes of others and presencing ourselves to our interbeingness, which is the discovery of the good. The other however different they are will be Ariadne’s thread guiding us back to our oneness with all of it.

Echo and Narcissus by John William Waterhouse 1903

Last but not least. Art is to awaken us from our sleep. 

This sleep takes several forms, for some it is a nightmare they desperately wish to awaken from; others let themselves go in the comfort of a delicious dream. Both of them are asleep, one just might have more incentive to wake up compared to the other. To be touched by beauty can help us out from our despair and call us to leave the trap of comfort.

I believe that art is a crucial dimension to help us go beyond modernity (and therefore also post-modernity). With the re-discovery of the ancient wisdom of the truth; the good and the beautiful. It is  the combination of these three ingredients in art that are the keys to liberate us, since these three parts have been long separated through our secular view of modernity.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1817, Kunsthalle Hamburg

The realm of beauty has been delegated into capitalistic commodities of fashion. The realm of the good has been appropriated by the activists. And the truth to science.

So may we give room to our creative side; may we stay connected to our inner child, of doing something just for the pure joy of it.  May we make sense of this coming new world through play. May we share the joy creativity gives us for no other reason than wanting to share that happiness with others. May we make art just for the sake of it because doing something just for the sake of it is already the start of getting out of doing something just because it has material or capitalistic worth. May we all let our creativity guide us into the second renaissance.

Because our creativity is intertwined with our understanding of the world.

Interested in diving deeper into your creativity? Then visit our Morning Creative Practice page to learn more and join us in a collective creative practice