by an anonymous artist
There are days, increasingly frequent, when I sit in my studio—pale light, coffee gone cold, canvas looming with its customary indifference—and wonder whether any of this matters. Not the brushwork, nor the composition, nor the clever, brittle little statement I wrote for my last show about “material semiotics and the haptic residue of gesture.” That phrase earned a good review. But now it just hovers above my desk, written in pencil, mocking me with its precise vagueness.
Is art important?
There. I’ve said it aloud, or at least written it in italics, which is almost the same. A dangerous question for someone who has built an entire life, not to say income stream, upon its presumed importance.
When I was younger—by which I mean arrogant in a more excusable way—I would have quoted Adorno or Barthes at you. Something about rupture or aura, something hard-edged and continental. I believed, without question, that art revealed truths other disciplines only brushed against. It could provoke, disturb, soothe, reorder perception. It was a necessity, not an accessory.
Now, I am not so sure. The world seems increasingly impervious to metaphor. Paintings hang in white rooms while glaciers slide quietly into the sea. A video installation exploring grief plays on loop while governments flatten nuance into slogans. The dissonance is hard to ignore.
It’s not that I think art is irrelevant—not quite. But perhaps it is over-described, over-valorised, over-freighted with expectation. We want it to save us, or at the very least, to justify its square footage. But sometimes a sculpture is just a sculpture. Sometimes an abstract painting is not a portal but an expensive silence.
And yet.
And yet I remember standing—was it in Florence, or Margate, or a college corridor somewhere?—before a small painting I had never seen before, and feeling briefly recalibrated. Not uplifted, exactly, but re-aligned. It offered no answers, but neither did it lie. That felt rare, and oddly merciful.
There is also, perhaps, the importance of making. Even if the world is unmoved, something happens in the act of arranging form and colour, of insisting that this, here, now, is worth paying attention to. That small, stubborn insistence may be its own argument.
Still, I remain unconvinced, which is not the same as disbelieving. Doubt, after all, is not an absence of faith, but its rigorous sibling.
I will keep painting, if only to see what happens. I will keep showing, if only because the lights are warm and someone always brings wine. And I will write again next month, when perhaps the pendulum will have swung one inch to the left, or I’ll have remembered a line from John Berger that restores my certainty for another week.
In the meantime, I hang my doubts neatly on the same hook as my apron. They dry slowly, like oil paint.
–An artist