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Life Is more important than art

Recent art exhibitions tackle life’s big questions. Jonathan Evens reviews their themes and the roles creators take.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A photo-realistic work of art depicting a fiigure raised on fire wood wearing a colour of large metal rays, against a desertifying landscape of dead trees.
The Prophecy, Untitled No.9, Fabrice Monteiro.
The Sainsbury Centre.

Life Is More Important Than Art claimed the recent summer exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery. Taking inspiration from African-American writer and novelist James Baldwin, who proposed that life is more important than art which is why art is important, the exhibition explored the intersection of art and everyday life and the role of contemporary art institutions in a time of uncertainty and change. As Whitechapel Gallery Director Gilane Tawadros has explained, Baldwin “meant that we have the bare necessities of life - a roof over our head, food to eat and so on - but life should be more than the bare necessities” and that’s “where art comes in.”  

The Whitechapel Gallery has not been alone at this time in exploring the place of art in relation to big issues and contemporary challenges. Recent exhibitions at the Gagosian, Hayward and Tate Galleries have each used specific philosophical theories to explore the legacy of colonialism and posit creative ways forward in the future, while Dear Earth, also at the Hayward Gallery, explored themes of care, hope, and emotional and spiritual connection with our environment. 

Their approach understands art as alive and capable of engaging people with the fundamental questions of life. 

Norwich’s Sainsbury Centre has perhaps been most systematic and ambitious in pursuing this particular trend in exhibition curation. In September, the Centre launched the first of its new Big Question seasons exploring the theme of Planet for our Future: How do we adapt to a Transforming World? The Centre is setting the exploration of big issues at the very heart of their exhibition programming, seeking to empower art to address fundamental societal challenges. Their approach understands art as alive and capable of engaging people with the fundamental questions of life and will see artworks from all over the world travelling to the Centre to pose urgent, global questions to visitors and help them find the answers. Future seasons will ask: What is truth? (Spring 2024); Why do people take drugs? (Autumn 2024); How do we resuscitate a dying sea? (Spring 2025); Can humans stop killing each other? (Autumn 2025); and What is the meaning of life? (Spring 2026). 

Planet for our Future has an interconnected programme of exhibitions, interventions, collection displays, an artist residency, museum-late, artist-led workshops, and special projects, taking place across the whole art landscape and out into neighbouring communities. It aims to empower art to generate a living dialogue with visitors, inviting them to consider the global challenges of pollution, environmental destruction, and climate change. The wider aim is to mobilise the Sainsbury Centre as a space of hope through the transformative power of art: a space where we can imagine better futures in which collective human behaviour mitigates the effects of climate change. 

Given the extent to which the exhibitions mentioned above include themes of spirituality, it would seem that Greenberg and his ilk were on the wrong side of history in this respect too. 

These approaches represent a remarkable success for the arguments that artist and academic Suzi Gablik made in the 1980’s and 1990’s in books such as Has Modernism Failed? and The Reenchantment of Art. Gablik contrasted ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ with ‘Art for Society’s Sake’ whilst arguing for the latter, a prescient choice given the current approaches of curators. At the time, Gablik was challenging the received wisdom of art critics such as Clement Greenberg who “rejected the notion that there is any higher purpose to art, or any ‘spiritual’ point to its production.” Given the extent to which the exhibitions mentioned above include themes of spirituality, it would seem that Greenberg and his ilk were on the wrong side of history in this respect too. 

I recently took part in The Art of Creation, a conference held at King's College London and organised through the National Gallery’s Interfaith Sacred Art Forum, which brought together speakers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the intersection of art, theology, and ecology. The conference was part of a year-long series of reflections on three paintings from the National Gallery’s Collection – Claude Monet’s Flood Waters, Vincent Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies, and Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Vase - which raise ecological concerns. The papers exploring aspects of these paintings drew on an eclectic, yet fascinating, range of sources including: Maori beliefs; the Jewish and Christian scriptures; South African poetry; the Nouvelle Theologie; the theology of resonance; the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Marilynne Robinson; and a range of related artworks including the work of Barnett Newman and Regan O’Callaghan. The conference initiated a dialogue regarding ways in which art and faith together can help us make reparative connections in a fragile world and its approaches suggest ways of engaging with the big issues that artists and curators are exploring. 

This relationship with creation mirrors that of artists (in the broadest sense), who are both sub-creators and co-creators. 

In my paper, which brought verses from Chapter 38 of the Book of Job into dialogue with the three paintings, I argued that God is calling humanity into a relationship with creation in which we respond with humility, awe and wonder to its abundance and diversity, which always exceeds our grasp however much knowledge of it we gain. I suggested, too, that this relationship with creation mirrors that of artists (in the broadest sense), who are both sub-creators and co-creators. As sub-creators, artists recognise that we cannot create from nothing (‘ex nihilo’) and are, therefore, always in a humble, interdependent state where we are as aware of boundaries, edges and frames as we are of openings, doorways and possibilities. As co-creators, we are called to work with the grain or tend the essence of creation and its creatures, as in the approach of sculptors who seek to be true to the materials they use or in the ideas Gerard Manley Hopkins developed regarding inscape and instress. 

This section of the poem concerning Job begins by initiating a dialogue as God challenges Job to stand up and answer the questions he poses about the created order; questions such as, do you know the measurements of the earth or the sources for oceans, light, snow and rain? At the time of writing Job, and the writer of this poem, could not answer those questions, so are left simply in a state of awe and wonder. We, however, are, often, able to answer such questions and are, as a result, able to discuss the meaning of such knowledge while also retaining an awareness of the vast dimensions of the abundance and diversity of creation within which our expanded and expanding knowledge remains infinitesimal compared with the whole. Interestingly, the novelist Marilynne Robinson suggests in an essay on ‘Psalm 8’ that, 

 “A question is more spacious than a statement, [being] far better suited to expressing wonder”. 

Artists have regularly worked with just such a balance through an awareness of being sub-creators and co-creators with God. Artists, including those considered by The Art of Creation conference, have often had a different relationship with the divine and with creation. Whether figurative artists working from nature, as are the three principal artists considered by The Art of Creation conference, or symbolic artists creating secondary worlds, artists are often aware of themselves as co-creators or, in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, sub-creators. We are sub-creators or co-creators when we recognise that we create from creation, not ex nihilo, which involves humility in order that we tend, rather than dominate, creation.

Claude Monet’s Flood Waters, Vincent Van Gogh’s Long Grass with Butterflies, and Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Vase.

A Monet painting of a flood with bare trees emerging from the grey water.
Claude Monet, Flood Waters.
A Van Gogh painting of grass tufts of green, yellow, lavender, grey and other colours.
Vincent Van Gogh: Long Grass with Butterflies.
A 17th century style painting of flowers in a vase against a dark background
Rachel Ruysch, Flowers in a Vase.

Van Gogh paints an expanse of grass extending beyond his canvas in Long Grass with Butterflies, while Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Vase brings flowers that bloom at different times of year together in one image. Awareness of edges, frames, borders, boundaries and other constraints in regard to their canvasses are used by these artists as an element in contrasting the limits of human understanding and the fecundity of nature. Even when artificially exceeding these boundaries, as Ruysch does, this can be in order to highlight our inability to do so in our primary world.  

Co-creation is a concept which takes us further in that it involves human creation which is in line with the essence of God’s creation. Another creation story, that of Adam naming the animals, this time from the Book of Genesis, is key to understanding this aspect of creativity. Names in ancient times described the essence of the creature or object so named. That is what is described in this story. In our naming of the animals together with God, we look for the essence of each creature and then name that essence. This suggests a path to exploring possibilities within creation in partnership with God by creating the new in harmony with the essence of the actual.  

This process of paying attention to come to know the essence of a thing by imaginatively exploring its various possibilities in order to realise its distinctive essence is what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called instress. He also called the essence that we identify the inscape. Ultimately, he suggests, “the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it.” He wrote more about this understanding in the poem ‘Kingfishers catch fire’: 

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: 

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; 

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, 

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. 

  

I say móre: the just man justices; 

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; 

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — 

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, 

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his 

To the Father through the features of men's faces.  

  

In an essay entitled ‘Wonders Never Cease: Integrity & the Modern Intellectual Condition’, Marilynne Robinson suggests that a theistic vision of the world, like that of Hopkins, “is freer to see the world whole, as it is in itself, so to speak” and she quotes Hopkins who says, “The world is full of the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil”. She continues: “Within this great given, that Being is an astonishment, any aspect of being can be approached with an expectation of discovering wondrous things. The slime that comes up from the depths of the sea in fishermen’s nets is a ruined universe of bioluminescence. Microorganisms live in clouds, air moves in rivers, butterflies navigate the earth’s magnetic field. The matter cosmologists call “dark,” which makes up most of the mass of the universe, seems to be non-atomic. Wonders never cease.”  As a result, in her essay on ‘Psalm 8’ she gives this credo,

“I have spent my life watching not to see beyond the world, [but] merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes … [as] With all due respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”  

The approach that Robinson and Hopkins advocate as artists is one that could assist us more generally in relation to the climate emergency, while the sense of wonder found in their work is replicated in the images of Monet, Van Gogh and Ruysch and is, I suggest, what God looks for from us in the questions that are posed in the Book of Job. By responding to a wide range of ideas and sources, The Art of Creation conference demonstrated a similar balance to awe and knowledge, recognising that this attitude and approach opens up reflection on the abundance of the world and cultures that God created and also holds out the possibility that new inspirations will be sparked from the interplay of ideas that ensues. These ways of relating art, creation and faith suggest one approach to engaging with the big issues that artists and curators are exploring and which faith communities, including the Church, have explored throughout the history of humanity. 

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Is empathy really a weapon?

Musk and Fonda disagree on whether empathy is a bug or a feature.
A montage shows Elon Musk wielding a chain saw, Jane Fonda flexing her muscles and Hannah Arendt smoking.
Wordd Wrestling Empathy.

You may have heard that you can kill a person with kindness, but in recent weeks have you also heard that you can bring about your own death through empathy? In an interview recorded with podcaster Joe Rogan in February, Elon Musk added his voice to a cohort of American neo-capitalists when he claimed, “We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on” and went on to describe empathy as having been “weaponized” by activist groups.  

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”  

In recent weeks empathy has become one of the hot topics of American politics, but this is not the first time that Musk has shared his thoughts about empathy, and it should be noted that on the whole he is not really against it. Musk identifies, rightly, that empathy is a fundamental component of what it means to be human, and in previous interviews has often spoken often about his vision to preserve “the light of human consciousness” – hence his ambition to set up a self-sustaining colony of humans on Mars.  

But he also believes that empathy is (to continue in Musk’s computer programming terminology) a vulnerability in the human code: a point of entry for viruses which have the capacity to manipulate human consciousness and take control of human behaviours. Empathy, Musk has begun to argue, makes us vulnerable to being infected:  

"The woke mind virus is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general. Empathy is a good thing, but when it is weaponized to push irrational or extreme agendas, it can become a dangerous tool." 

Strangely, on certain fundamentals, I find it easy to agree with Musk and his contemporaries about empathy. For example, I agree that empathy is essential to being human. Although, far from empathy leading us to “civilisational suicide”, I would say it is empathy that saves humanity from this fate. If consciousness is (as Musk would define it) the brain’s capacity to process complex information and make a rational and informed choices, then empathy, understood as the ability to anticipate the experiences, feelings, and even reactions of others, is a crucial source of that information. Without empathy, we cannot make good decisions that benefit wider society and not just ourselves. Without it, humanity becomes a collection of mere sociopaths. 

Another point on which Musk and I agree is that empathy is a human weak point, one that can be easily exploited. Ever since the term “empathy” was coined in the early twentieth century, philosophers and psychologists have shown a sustained fascination with the way that empathy causes us to have concern for the experiences of others (affective empathy), to think about the needs of others (cognitive empathy), and even to feel the feelings of others (emotional contagion). Any or all of these responses can be used for good or for ill – so yes, I agree with Musk that empathy has the potential to be exploited.  

But it is on this very question of who is exploiting empathy and why, that I find myself much more ready to disagree with Musk. Whilst he argues that “the woke mind virus” is using empathy to push “irrational and extreme agendas”, his solution is to propose that empathy must be combined with “knowledge”. On the basis of knowledge, he believes, sober judgement can be used to resist the impulse of empathy and rationally govern our conscious decision making. Musk states: 

“Empathy is important. It’s important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to." 

What I notice in this system is that Musk places knowledge before empathy, as if existing bits of information, “fundamental principles”, are the lenses through which one can interpret the experiences of another and then go on to make a conscious and rational judgement about what we perceive.  

There is a certain realism to this view, one that has not been ignored by philosophers. The phenomenologists of the early twentieth century, Husserl, Heidegger, Stein – those who first popularised the very idea of empathy – each described in their own way how all of us experience the world from the unique positionality of our own perspective. Our foreknowledge is very much like a set of lenses that strongly governs what we perceive and dictates what we can see about the world around us. The problem is: that feeling of foreknowledge can easily be manipulated. To put it another way – we ourselves don’t entirely decide what our own lenses are.  

To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code. 

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, another great twentieth century thinker, Hannah Arendt, explored how totalitarian regimes seek to control not just the public lives but also the thought lives of individuals, flooding them with ideologies that manipulate precisely this: they tell people what to see. Ideologies are, in a sense, lenses – ones that make people blind to the unjust and violent actions of a regime:  

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." 

A big part of the manipulation of people’s sense of foreknowledge is the provision of simplistic explanations for complex issues. For example, providing a clearly identifiable scapegoat, a common enemy, as a receptacle of blame for complex social and economic problems. As we know all too painfully, in early twentieth century Europe, this scapegoat became the Jewish people. Arendt describes how, whilst latent antisemitism had long been a feature of European public life, the Nazi party harnessed this this low-level antipathy and weaponised it easily. People’s sense of foreknowledge about the “differentness” of this group of “outsiders” was all too manipulable, and it was further cultivated by the Nazis’ use of “disease”, “contagion” and “virus” metaphors when speaking about the Jews. This gave rise a belief that it was rational and sensible to keep one’s distance and have no form of dialogue with this ostracised group.  

But with such distance, how would a well-meaning German citizen ever identify that their sense of foreknowledge about what it meant to be Jewish had been manipulated? Arendt identified rightly that totalitarian systems seek to eliminate dialogue, because dialogue creates the possibility of empathy, the possibility of an exchange of perspectives that might lead to knowledge – or at least a more nuanced understanding of what is true about complex situations. 

When I look at Musk’s comments, I wonder if what I can see is a similar instinct for scapegoating, and for preventing dialogue with those who might provide the knowledge that comes from another person’s perspective. In his rhetoric, the “woke mind” has been declared a common enemy, a “dangerous virus” that can deceive us into becoming “anti-merit” and “anti-human.” In dialogue, those who claim to be suffering or speaking about the suffering of others might be enabled to deploy their weaponized empathy, trying to make us care about other, to the potential detriment of ourselves and even wider humanity’s best interests. Therefore, it is made to seem better to isolate oneself and make rational judgements on behalf of those in need, firmly based on one’s existing foreknowledge, rather than engage in dialogue that might expose us to the contagion of wokeness.  

Whilst this isolationist approach appears to wisely prioritise knowledge over empathy, it misses the crucial detail that empathy itself is a form of knowledge. The experience of empathising through paying attention to and dialoguing with the “other” is what expands our human consciousness and complexifies our human decision making by giving us access to new information. To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code.  

In these divisive and divided times, there are, fortunately, those who are still bold enough to make the rallying cry back to empathy. At her recent acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award, actor and committed Christian Jane Fonda spoke warmly and compellingly in favour of empathy:  

“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy, and not judge, but listen from our hearts, and welcome them into our tent, because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what's coming at us.”  

Fonda’s use of the tent metaphor, I’m sure, was quite deliberate. One of the most famous bible passages about the birth of Jesus describes how he “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The word “dwelt” can also be translated “tabernacled” or, even more literally, “occupied a tent” among us. The idea is that God did not sit back, judging from afar, despite having all the knowledge in the world at his disposal. Instead, God came to humanity through the birth of Jesus, and dwelt alongside us, in all our messy human complexity.  

Did Jesus then kill us with his kindness? No. But you might very well argue that his empathy led to his death. Perhaps this was Musk’s “suicidal empathy.” But in that case Musk and I have found another point about empathy on which we can agree – one that is summed up in the words of Jesus himself: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”   

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