I’m sick of talking about art in the context of how dire the current artistic landscape is. We get it; there’s no funding, AI is taking over the world, Bachelor of Arts graduates are somewhat screwed (I can say that, I am one), and Act’s arts spokesman took 20 minutes to think of a single Kiwi author or book. But fuck feeding that narrative. Art deserves more than to be reduced to a price tag or technological doom.
Art can be a slippery concept. It may call to mind paint by numbers kits from your childhood, the mural on the side of Thirsty, drawing a still-life of an apple in high school, or smooth-walking through a gallery with an adopted air of snobbery, whispering to your friend, “I could do that.” Really, though, we’re surrounded by and engage with art constantly – you’d feel its absence if art were to be sucked from the world.
Whether it’s through a painting, a book, a film, a song, or a really cracker poem, art is an effective tool for creative expression and storytelling. You feel its effects when the corners of your lips have tugged up and your eyes adorn a twinkle as your imagination bursts open. When you have adopted a new perspective on something, felt full to the brim with ideas and a deep-rooted sense of admiration for the world, or commiserated in a sense of relief that you’re not alone in your darkest fears.
Pause for a second. Consider when you’ve felt the most inspired in your life. Was it when you left the movies? Put down a novel to absorb a paragraph that felt like a gut punch? Looked out the window of a bus, ear buds in, and listened to a song that matched your mood perfectly, and later screamed the lyrics to it at a gig? Related to an existential monologue by a cartoon man with a horse head? That’s art.
Andrew Garfield hit home the importance of art to me when I listened to an episode of the New York Times podcast ‘Modern Love’ titled ‘Andrew Garfield wants to crack your heart open’. The interview was part of the press tour for his and Florence Pugh’s movie We Live in Time. To me, the movie was a masterpiece. Full of intimate and raw moments from their relationship – washing dishes and debriefing about a dinner party, cracking eggs for breakfast, and navigating Florence’s character’s cancer diagnosis – it depicted real life. The quiet moments that are part of the human experience, but usually happen behind closed doors.
Part of the Modern Love show structure is that each guest is invited to read an essay of their choice. Midway through reading an essay written from the perspective of an imprisoned man who wanted to be “the best prisoner he could be”, something unexpected happened: Andrew started to cry. It was after a sentence about how the man’s wife no longer wears a bikini, which made him sad: “She’s a beautiful woman with grey in her hair.”Asked what moved him, he said, “It’s mysterious. It’s why art is so important – it can get us to places we can’t get to any other way.”
Andrew spoke about a philosophy called ‘onism’, the sorrow of knowing you will only be able to live your own life, that you are restricted to your own life and its experiences. But art is an opportunity to step into someone else’s head. It encourages empathy, complexity, and nuance in a way that the attention economy has flattened (there’s only so much a clickbait headline can convey). Artists notice and they share this in beautiful and varied forms. They are the most honest among us, putting pieces of themselves into their work, expressing things that others experience but don’t say out loud.
It’s difficult to encapsulate all that art has to offer in just one editorial – it beautifies, it mystifies, connects, and communicates. Then on the night of print, midway through writing this I was blessed with a viewing of staff writer Jono’s inter-flat beef diss track parodying ‘Not Like Us’ (with accompanying video) that reminded me of one characteristic I’d been missing: art is also just fun.