Essay
Culture
Doubt
Music
Psychology
9 min read

What happens when perfect plans are outsmarted by the world?

There may be delight hiding in the doom.
Two people sit and stand next to a grand piano on a stage.
Striking the wrong note.
Polyfilm.

If I’ve learned anything at all from decades working with businesses, it’s that they love an acronym. For a while the acronym we loved was VUCA. Not a nuclear jet nor a foot wart, VUCA emerged from the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus to reflect the Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity of contemporary leadership. Nothing gets a roomful of executives nodding sagely than the observation that we live in a VUCA world. For a while it felt almost sacrilegious not to evoke VUCA at some point when training leaders. It was comforting to tell people who were supposed to be shaping the world that everything was, well… a bit nuts. 

But in the last few years VUCA has lost its shine. Things have started to get too crazy, a bit too VUCA for anyone’s liking. The wars, the plagues, the natural disasters, the political upheaval, the shaking of old certainties- it’s all gone a bit super-VUCA. The acronym that once reassured us that the world tends to resist our perfect plans has been outsmarted by the world it once captured. What are we to call this permacrisis, this omnishambles, this SNAFU, when super-mega-hyper-VUCA just sounds stupid? A new acronym was needed. Enter stage left- BANI, the invention of futurologist Jamias Cascio to designate the way things are now: Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear, Incomprehensible. We’ve had a romantic breakup with the world- you’re not like it used to be, you used to be fun, you’ve changed!  

In March, Seen & Unseen celebrates its second anniversary. We are two years old. Old enough to appreciate a birthday cake, too young not to burn our fingers on the candles. I’ve been writing for the site since the beginning and to this day feel surprised that this quirky mishmash of a brainfart I keep writing is still accepted for publication each month. Either the folks at Seen& Unseen are pathologically kind to their own detriment, or my monthly missive of misery is not quite as off the wall as I fear it might be.  

When I look at the world, I feel like we’re in a football match with no referee. I keep shouting foul and looking for someone to blow the whistle. It feels like the Tower of Babel. Even the technologies we thought would unify us have made us incomprehensible to one another. Like the scene in That Hideous Strength (the third book in C.S. Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy) where a roomful of people is magically befuddled. They can no longer understand each other, and anyone who rises to take charge of the situation speaks gibberish that only adds volume to the babble. We don’t need any more opinions. We certainly don’t need any more people with misplaced certainty they have the answer. 

To be honest, I’ve just run out of ideas. I’m confused, baffled, clueless. But what embarrasses me most is not my helplessness, it’s my hope. For some reason, in jarring contrast to the circumstances, I can’t shake off the sense that ultimately all this will make sense, that breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. We’re in the unbearable part of the story where everything goes wrong, but if we put the book down now, we’ll think that was the end of it, when it was really just the set up. Pretty much everything I’ve written for Seen & Unseen over the last two years equates to: grief, this looks bad, but maybe there is more to it than it appears. 

There is another anniversary being celebrated this year. This January marked the fiftieth year of a musical event so remarkable that a new dramatization of it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival to mark the occasion – the recording of The Köln Concert. (Watch the trailer of Köln 75.) If we are looking for a story of how beauty emerges from disaster, this one is worth telling. The event was organised by eighteen-year-old Vera Brandes, at that time the youngest concert promoter in Germany. She booked the Cologne Opera House, but given that it was a jazz concert, it was scheduled to begin at 11:30pm following an opera performance earlier that evening.  

The performer, jazz pianist, Keith Garrett travelled to the concert from Zurich. But rather than flying, he sold his ticket for cash and opted to make the 350-mile trip north with his producer Manfred Eicher in a Renault 4. He had not slept well for several nights and arrived late afternoon in pain, wearing a back brace, only to discover that the opera house had messed up. The Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano he had requested had been replaced by a much smaller Bösendorfer baby grand the staff had found backstage. The piano was intended for rehearsals only, in poor condition, out of tune, with broken keys and pedals. It was unplayable. Jarrett tried it briefly and refused to perform. But Vera Brandes had sold 1,400 tickets for the evening. So, while he headed out to eat, she promised to get him the piano he required. 

But it was not to be. The piano tuner who arrived to fix the baby grand tells her a replacement is impossible. It was January in Northern Germany, the weather was wet and cold, and any grand piano transported in those conditions without specialist equipment would be damaged irreparably. They had to stick with the piano they had. Keith Jarrett’s meal didn’t go well either. There was a mix up at the restaurant and their food arrived late. They barely had chance to eat anything before returning to the venue. And when Garratt saw the tiny defective Bösendorfer still on the stage, he again refused to play, only changing his mind because Eicher’s sound-engineers were set up to record.  

So the concert begins. A reluctant pianist – tired, hungry and in pain – sits at a ruined piano, and records the bestselling piano solo album and bestselling jazz album. Ever. He improvises for over an hour. Starting tentatively, exploring the contours, befriending the limitations of his damaged instrument – learning its capabilities as he plays. But soon Jarrett is whooping, yelling and humming with delight as he extracts beauty from the brokenness. The limited register forces him to play differently. The disconnected pedals become percussion. By the time he reaches the encore, the joy of his playing is irrepressible – it sends shivers down the spine. And when he finishes, the applause goes on. Forever.  

Jarrett pulled off an impossible feat and sealed his reputation as one of the greatest pianists of his generation. And I take heart from the event, because when I face the world, I sometimes imagine I feel like he did facing that piano. Tired and pained and doubtful any good will come of playing. Can I order a new world, please? One more to my liking. One less likely to hurt. Yet I can’t quite shake off the intuition that there may be delight hiding in the doom, a treasure only unearthed by those willing to play. 

I am drawn to Job. He is a hero to all those who are sick of the answers of others but have no answers themselves. 

This year I celebrate my own anniversary. I was born seven months after that fateful night in Cologne, in the equally salubrious town of Birkenhead. This is my fiftieth year too. The 3:15pm of life: too early to clock off, too late to start anything new. If living is a race between maturity and senility – gaining the wisdom to live before losing our marbles – then I’m odds-on for a photo finish. The evidence accumulates daily that I am likely to live longer than most of my vocabulary.  

Jung held a positive view of old age. He viewed it as the time for religion to ripen. And I can’t help agreeing with him. The older I get the closer God seems. As muscle mass thins the spirit deepens. Outwardly I’m fading away, inwardly I am being renewed day by day. This undoubtedly underlies my hope of beauty arising from our brokenness. In some small and barely noticeable way it is already happening in me. And I know I’m not alone in that.  

Jung also wrote about Job- the Hebrew epic of suffering and restoration. Job’s life is like one of those old blues songs. He loses his wife, his kids, his home, his health. He’s left broken, infested with sores and sitting in the dust. If you’ve been in a situation like that, you’ll know that even the most well-meaning friends can respond with surprising incompetence. Job’s friends are no different. They are true believers in Just-World Theory, the universal human tendency to assume that if bad things happen to us we must deserve them, we must have been bad. They live in a world ultimately governed by the kind of instant karma that causes car crashes on YouTube, and they’re keen to teach Job the way the world really is.  

But Job resists them at every turn. He may have a proverbial reputation for patience, but he is anything but patient. I used to think this was a story about a man defending his innocence, but it’s much more than that. It’s the story of a man who goes through a breakup with God. He once lived a life of goodness, abundance, and gratitude in which he knew God as attentive and lovingly present. His friends are not just arguing that he’s being punished for some undisclosed sin, but that he’d always been wrong about God. He’d never known God- not really. The God they knew was volatile, capricious, arbitrary, vicious - like a rescue dog, you never quite knew when he would turn. And Job’s suffering was the proof of it. 

The problem for Job is that he has no clue why he is suffering, but he will not let his friends obliterate the history he has shared with heaven. He knows God to be utterly faithful, constantly present, sublimely attuned, hugging the contours of his life as the sea hugs the shore. He wants nothing to do with a fickle god who falls asleep on the job or flounces off the first time we let him down. He rejects the here-again gone-again god of his friends. Sometimes, to know God, we need to reject those who claim to speak for God.  

The weird thing in Job’s story is that eventually God shows up. Over the course of the narrative, he has asked God 122 questions, and God responds with 61 of his own. The questions are rhetorical- they point to all the places God is present that Job isn’t, all the things that God knows that Job doesn’t, all the things God has done that Job hasn’t. And by the end, Job is satisfied, his friends are dismissed, and his life is restored. God is as Job expected, intimately present but ultimately mysterious. He was right to reject the obtuse certainties of his friends and face the pain of the world with a cultivated sense of unknowing. 

When I ponder how best to bring beauty out of a BANI world, how best to play its brokenness like Jarret played his Bösendorfer, I am drawn to Job. He is a hero to all those who are sick of the answers of others but have no answers themselves. He is also a hero to those who, despite all evidence to the contrary, cannot smother their hope. Those who discern the leavening yeast sown in the hearts of humans across the planet; too inconspicuous to make the news, but destined to rise when the time is right.

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Watch the Köln 75 trailer

Essay
Art
Culture
Trauma
7 min read

From egalitarian to elite: 100 years of Art Deco

Birthed by a lost generation, its legacy is not what its creators sought

Sarah Basemera is a circular economy enthusiast and a founder of Canopi, a boutique for recrafted furniture.

An art deco poster shows the heads of three woman against a beach background.
McGill Library on Unsplash.

Agatha Christie, The Savoy Hotel, Cartier, The Great Gatsby, and All That Jazz sit under the gilt-edge umbrella that is Art Deco. This design movement blossomed for two decades. In 2025, Art Deco turns 100 years old. Today, it's a celebrated era for its gift to design, but what can we learn from this period, and how have the ideologies of this period stood the test of time? 

Art Deco saw  geometric patterns with rectilinear lines, rich jewel contrasting colours with luxury exotic materials, virtuosic craftsmanship, and streamlined expression in architecture, furniture, fashion, art, and jewelry.  

On the surface, this style had many muses, from traditional African art to Cubism. It linked the discovery of Tutankhamen in 1926 with the ceramics of Japan. The bold theatrical colours of the costumes and stage designs of the Ballet Russes, also made a huge impression on Deco creatives. It infused their work with the first vibrant, intense strokes of modern design.  

Over the past 100 years, we have applied Art Deco ideas in different ways, taking what we want from it when we needed to. 

It was the first truly international style, yet it had distinct local expressions. American Art Deco – such as the ornate topped skyscrapers like the Empire State building, had a different expression from opulent Parisian objects such as Cartier alabaster cigar boxes. 

The original Art Deco creatives sought to capture the essence of beauty refined to its simplest form. There was a focus on geometric shapes, symmetry and measured ornamentation.  They wanted to remove the excess frills of previous generations and refine the design.   

Under the gilt-edged Art Deco umbrella were two somewhat opposing arms – the decadent strand vs the essentialist. Today, in popular culture, we remember this period for the Roaring Twenties, excess and hedonism. The decadent strand favoured luxurious, opulent craftsmanship. Its products were attainable only by a small pool of wealthy patrons. 

The essentialist strand – "Art Deco de Moderne" began with noble intentions. They prized efficiency and simplicity, characterised by geometric rectilinear designs. These creatives wanted design to respond to the changing needs of the age. They wanted great design to be accessible to more people. Both strands recognised the power of design to elevate the human experience. They invested in the endeavour to craft beauty across the entire sphere of life, from elevated factories to generous streamlined apartments. 

Vogue Cup and Saucer, 1930, V&A Museum.

An art deco cup and saucer on display.
Vogue cup and saucer, 1930.

100 years later, the problem of accessibility of good design hasn't been fixed. Craftspeople still need to find ways to sustain a living. Handmade design from natural materials is still mainly attainable by the wealthiest. Local craftsmanship is in crisis, and many of us do not know and cannot afford artisans to make things for us from natural materials. Many skilled artisans cannot maintain workshops in our cities. 

Art Deco designers may not have described themselves as hedonists, but they certainly produced goods with this dazzling class in mind. These designers had to be at ease with this world and knew how to play its game to remain commercially viable. So why did the Art Deco Age gush with an ideology of hedonism?  

The philosophy of hedonism from the interwar period reflected the worldview of the so-called 'Lost Generation'. American author Gertrude Stein famously said to a young Ernest Hemingway years after World War I: 

"All of you young people who served in the war... You are all a lost generation . . . You have no respect for anything. You drink yourself to death ...". 

This mood was the backdrop to the literary and creative landscape of the 1920s. 

 When the Great War ended, people wanted to celebrate - play, party and travel, but euphoria for some turned to excess. The simple joys of living here and now became an absolute value. They had witnessed the horrors of war, the fragility of life and were jubilant, wishing to live life to the full. Knowing life could be cut short, the doyennes of the age swung into excess, supposedly breaking free of Christian values, only to find they became trapped in cycles of gratification that didn't deliver. "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!" 

This unbridled hedonism was their feast after the plague - it was a coping mechanism. They couldn't think about the future – living here and now was a maxim underpinning this period.  

The Lost Generation grasped the concept of being present in the moment, but they also discovered numbing pain was a deeply unsatisfying solution. 

Fast forward a hundred years, and hedonism is still elusive and utterly unhelpful. It still has a numbing rather than a healing effect. Perhaps its modern relative is bingeing. You know what your binge is, and so does Netflix and our NHS.  

What can the hedonists hijack of Art Deco teach us? Looking sympathetically on this era – hedonism appears to be a coping mechanism. Something humans have needed for aeons. "Do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own",said Jesus. The Lost Generation grasped the concept of being present in the moment, but they also discovered numbing pain was a deeply unsatisfying solution. 

Ideally, the weight of grief and loss must be wrestled with, carried, shared and not buried. In great pain, it is still wiser to face it, wrestle, get help and cry out to God. In our age, we have the benefit of hindsight to know that burying trauma produces unhealthy outcomes in the long term. We have the privilege of being able to access counsellors, therapists and psychologists.  

The fragility of being in the shadow of death doesn't hang over us today in the West, because we haven't had a recent World War. The closest reminder came through the COVID-19 pandemic. For a moment, we were all forced to focus on simpler things and live less frenetically.  

Another ideology underpinning the age of Art Deco was the belief in the transformative power of the machine age. In this era, confidence rose in the ability of machines.  Steamships, aeroplanes, automobiles, electrification and telecommunications were transformative innovations.  

The rise of machines represented a break from the failed past and the move into modernity into the future. Some of the more modern leaning Art Deco designers took inspiration from the shapes of the new machines and hoped that mass production would lead to more democratic outcomes, with good design being available to all. From Art Deco de Moderne, we began to learn the beauty of simplicity. Efficiency and essentialism were prized. It was the forerunner to Modernism proper. Sadly, this aspect has been butchered over the decades and reproduced unfaithfully in architecture and consumer products. The principle of celebrating the inventiveness of man slowly evolved into something less noble. The desire to return to the essence of good design was galvanised by the need to rebuild fast after World War Two, both as a sign of triumphalism but also to give the nation decent homes. Council house homes were built quickly to rehouse the nation using cheap materials. 

Today, mass production has indeed made design more accessible. More of us have access to contemporary-designed objects and clothes because they are manufactured quickly out of cheap, synthetic, non-biodegradable, toxic materials, at the sweat and tears of workers who are trapped in inhumane conditions, rarely seeing sunlight or fair wages. 

Nevertheless, 100 Years of Art Deco design has shown us that quality still endures over quantity. The Art Deco legacy of brilliant buildings made of robust materials, with subtle virtuoso ornamentation, has survived the test of time. Though more of us can enjoy contemporary design at affordable prices, I doubt we will cherish most of what we own today even 20 years from now. It is mass-produced, less durable and made from low-grade materials and built to pass. 

Art Deco teaches us, our legacy is not in our hands but in those who remember us. Today, we look back at Art Deco not as egalitarian or hopeful but as opulent and lavish. The intellectuals of that age openly lived torn by their excesses, some even dying by suicide. Yet it was meant to be designed for the ordinary person and to elevate all. By simplifying design to its essence, it was supposed to democratise design. 

From Wall Street Deco to the frivolous woos and woes of Wodehousian characters and music in the keys of Jazz, this era has made its distinguished, enduring mark on the arts. Beneath the sparkle, what has developed an enduring patina with age, is the high quality of craftsmanship across all fields. 

Looking beyond the arts, the Lost Generation has taught us that escapism is elusive and to be cautious but not charmed by machines. We can delight in excellent craftsmanship and cherish the beauty of essence. 

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