THE NECESSITY OF ART Post Covid: 1

STREAMS OF INSPIRATION

Artists are fed by a particular stream, an invisible stream. Sometimes we call it our muse, or we name it an emotion –‘I am driven by love and hate’; maybe we name it a cause –‘liberty’, ‘rebellion’, fairness, or proclaim it a consequence of ideology: Communism, Christianity, pan-Arabism.

RICKY ROMAIN AT WORK, Axminster, England, 2015; photos Robert Golden

Whatever it is, this invisible and immeasurable source of art, which is a deep pool of cultural ideas and emotions, perhaps a turbine or network of energy, is necessary for the artist to believe and to produce. If and when it ceases to be, ceases to feed us, ceases to inspire and call upon all the rest of our temporal, technical, emotional and intellectual resources, it is as if the muse has died.

THE ONLY METRIC

We are flattened, we suffer blindness, writer’s block; ennui overcomes us. We become nothing because we have only measured ourselves as artists, producers of beauty, truth and stimuli for others to rise into the light becoming full human beings. Without that purpose, sadly, like victims of the Protestant Ethic, we believe we are worthless in the eyes of God, others and ourselves.

LOSS

Even atheists are lost without their muse. At the moment of loss, one’s memory of the original source, sound, light, person’s face or a sentence spoken, a poet’s intuition, an aubergine on a yellow cloth, a monochrome hand reaching through the bars for the sun, dust motes in the moon’s shafts, the death of a hero, the loss of a lover will have faded and our driven natures will be stalled in some hell of self-satisfaction or embittered by resentments.

SPRINGS OF CHANGE

Creativity often arises from the poor and working classes because it is they who have dreams of a decent life, and they who have a passionate commitment to change. The wealthy and the well-to-do middle classes only have an interest in supporting the past culture because its myths sustains their wealth.

 Remember one of Leonard Cohen’s last songs:

“as he died to make things holy,

we die to make things cheap.”

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COMMITMENT TO ?

In the post Covid period artists will have to decide whether they will commit themselves to humanity and therefore, to change or to re-embrace the same old same old, and therefore, to commit themselves to those who are wilfully destroying communities, culture and this good earth.

To understand the weight of this decision, artists need to understand what the Neoliberal ‘new normal’ has done across the last 40 years to all of us and to our planet and what they will continue to do if we do not force change.

NEXT: I am going to tell the story of the last 40 years as briefly as I can.