Art needs to be honest. Sometimes, it’s the only pure honesty you’ll get all day.

‘Art needs to be honest. Sometimes, it’s the only pure honesty you’ll get all day.’ 

I read this line in Emily Nagin’s review for the book ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’. This was the line that sold me on the book which, by the way, is as gorgeous as the title. 

But the line itself stuck with me long after, because I felt I knew it long before I even read it.

Not because I am telepathic, but because I recognise what art feels like. We all do. We recognise it in words in books, in expressions on screen, in dance on stages, in music on radios. There is something pure that moves us, that changes us, that shapes us.

There is a brilliant 9 minute interview of Ethan Hawke where he says, “Art is not a luxury, it’s sustenance”, that we don’t recognise the value of art until we come across a stage in life where we don’t know how ro process our own emotions, how to find someone, anyone, in the world who has felt what we feel right now. 

Art is the outlet to our doubt, grief, joy and overwhelm. Something to hang onto while the world around us collapses.

So it torments me to see art outsourced. Not to humans, but to a system. As if it is a chore, a burden. As if it is just content to be trained, to be regurgitated - for who to read, I do not know.

Are we just consumers now? Endless black holes for more and more, never satisfied, never at peace.

How could we be at peace, though?  

We are trying to feed off of something that has never felt anything, least of all anything honest.

So imagine the pain we are in, the joy we never get to express, the words we never utter, the catharsis we never experience.

We are all on our individual plateau - too afraid to be touched by any emotion. Building mountains of protective armour of more tools, more methods, more ways to suppress anything real, anything human. Numb, dissociated- measuring art by what it brings in, how much ego it satisfies, not by what it means. 

And healing doesn’t come in questions being answered on chat. It comes in empathy, in the presence of someone’s raw self, in recognition of our unbearable humanity.

Art is impolite. Art is imperfect. Art is unoptimised. Art is painful.

Because being human is.