We Need To Be Making Things, Now More Than Ever
This essay kills fascists.
The world right now is unfathomable heavy. Each day’s headlines hang around our neck like a cinder block pendant. Accomplishing the smallest, most pedestrian tasks requires immense feats of effort. Maybe more than we can even muster right now. So, what are we to do?
The obvious answer is to start working on that book. Or recording that album. Pulling the easel and canvas back out from the closet. Or whatever it is that we’ve been wanting to do, but couldn’t find the time or motivation for. What else is there to do when there’s nothing else to do but make stuff?
The world has lurched unexpectedly in a direction of questionable reason. A fever has come over the people around us that’s unlikely to be broken through any amount of arguing, yelling, or even explaining. We can scream at the top of our lungs without turning a single head. There’s not currently an electoral or rhetorical solution to our problem. We’re not going to change all the minds that need to be changed. We’re just not. But we can change our own minds. We can demonstrate to ourselves that there is good in the world, because we’re fucking making it.
The best thing that you can do right now, while society circles its way down the toilet drain, is make something.
In these tryingest of times, art is an absolute necessity. Creative pursuits—no matter how frivolous they may seem—are a lifeline to hope. They connect us to other people, and they connect us to the better parts of ourselves.
Authoritarianism, fascism, white nationalism, Trumpism, all that gross shit, they’re all destructive in their nature. They don’t offer to build things. They just promise to tear shit down. To reduce culture to a fine enough rubble that it can be easily dominated. There’s nothing new about our current situation. It’s been like this since forever.
Have you ever heard of The Degenerate Art exhibition? It was a collection of modern art, deemed “degenerate” by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, put on public display in Munich, 1937. As a means of mocking its unfamiliarity and strangeness. Across the street, there was a second show, called the Great German Art Exhibition. It featured “proper” art. “Pleasant” art. Created in the Classical style. The kind of thing that had once been revolutionary, but long, long ago. A safe distance in the past. None of the aesthetically pleasing pieces in that show would offend the German people’s delicate sense of comfort.
Does that sound at all familiar?
The best thing that you can do right now, while society circles its way down the toilet drain, is make something. Make something that makes you happy. Not due to its subject matter, necessarily. But happy that it’s being made at all. It really doesn’t need to be overtly political. It doesn’t need to be subtly political. The act of creation in the midst of destruction is inherently political. It’s telling the world that you’re not giving up. It’s telling yourself that you’re not giving up. Making things in defiance of entropy is a potent form of protest. Standing against the current of despair, and offering something hopeful and thoughtful and genuine is a radical act.
More-so, it’s an act of generosity. Not just to others, but to ourselves. People may or may not like what you make. But they don’t have to. That’s not the point. It’s the act itself that’s the offering. When you walk through the world unbowed, you make a powerful statement. And you may inspire others to follow your lead. And if they do, they might open up a part of themselves that they thought was shut for good. And that’s how it spreads. Slowly. Person to person. Project to project. They same way that our country was eaten up by hate, but in reverse.
And that’s why authoritarians don’t like unsanctioned art.
And it’s why we need to be making it.
The featured image in this article was painted by Jewish artist Felix Nussbaum while in hiding in Brussels, 1942. Two years before he and his wife, Felka Platek, were found, arrested, and shipped off to Auschwitz, from whence they never returned. The people who did the betraying and arresting and killing—we don’t know their names. And nobody fucking cares.
