Painters and poets, to the barricades!
2025 is the best time ever to be and artist. It’s also the most important.
As the wheels seem to careen off the jerryrigged go-cart that is our world, we artists have a weapon that no army, or navy, or computer can rival.
History proves it out. For as long as there have people, the world has dealt us chaos, fear, and darkness. But it has also ladled out joy, delight, and happiness. And through it all, who have we turned to to make some semblance of sense of it all? The kids who could draw.
During the blitz over London, when firebombs rained down from the sky, Churchill insisted the concert halls remain open. “Are you nuts?” people asked. “Why are we wasting time listening to tunes when we should be fighting?” Churchill’s response — “so the people remember what they’re fighting for.’
Fellow artists, it seems our “useless” scribbles aren’t as useless as they appear to be. They are the weapons humans use to wrestle meaning from chaos.What we make bestows dignity, messy, illogical, spine-tingling dignity.
Not to mention what we make is the secret weapon in the World War that’s raging between humanity and that thing called A.I.
Talk about existential threats, this would have Sartre shivering in his skivvies. In his last breath, physicist Stephen Hawking’s computer generated voice sounded the alarm about artificial intelligence. Stanley Kubrick rang the warning bell nearly 40 years ago. Today, Yuval Noah Hariri scouts the frontlines and the reports are grim.
What’s to stop our enemy from “deciding” to simply unplug us? How can our paltry wetware launch a defense against the onslaught of hardware and software that’s sucking up more than its fair share of whatever carbon energy sources are left?
Here are some practical next (first?) steps:
* Be as human and messy as you can be. Our secret weapon is the fact that computers don’t make mistakes. That they’re not distracted? That they never knew the sensation of cold watermelon gushing over your cheeks on a steamy summer day. Or the pain and fear of getting your first shot at the doctor. Use it.
* While you’re at it, forget the e-mail. Write letters and cards. With ink (or pencil). Not only will that keep those nice people who work at the Post Office employed, it’ll leave future generations a record of our time once all the power is off. Paper in the Cairo Geniza shone a light on ancient life after almost a thousand years sitting in an attic. Do that with an Instagram post.
* Make your stuff the best you can make it. Only by failing, and failing, and failing again, can we outfox the beast. The enemy isn’t programmed to fail, A.I. doesn’t do accidents. But we humans do. And us artists, by facing that failure and repurposing it, we turn chaos into comedy, substitute order for disorder, bring tears of joy, and the laughter of pity. Make meaning. Survive.
* Get together with other artists, and neighbors. Show your art, read it, share it, close to home. As my friend Lisa Deglaintoni is doing with Evanston Made, start an arts group, a gallery. Or as she says, “be the light.”
* Whatever you make, make it as though your life depends on it. Because it does. Every poemfilmpaintinghaikucomic you bring into the world without using A.I. strikes a blow for our side, for people.
We’ve done it before. When an ice age drove our great great great (times a million) grandparents into caves, our scribbles drew them out. When disease blotted out Europe, our songs survived and waited for us. The shock of the new, that’s what we make.
Fellow artists, our “useless” pictures and stories are all all we’ve got. Our last stand.
Singers, man the torpedoes. Writers, shoulder your pens. Sculptors sharpen you chisels. Or, as the great cartoonist Peter Arno put it, “back to the drawing board!”