Art In A Time Of Corona
If I had a million dollars, I’d invest in Netflix, toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
If I had a billion dollars, I’d invest in a cure for the Coronavirus.
If I had a trillion dollars, I’d fund a localised economy that doesn’t disintegrate the moment we can’t burn fossil fuels.
But I don’t have a million dollars.
Just a quadrillion dead ends, burnt bridges and broken branches.
But I do have one thing. I have an idea.
I’m going to invest in myself.
I’m going to extend my trust, test my patience and try my luck.
I’m going to ensure that which does not kill me makes me stronger, braver and truer.
I’m going to do more than wash my hands. I’m going to cleanse my soul.
I’ll sanitize my anxiety with a healthy does of “doing the thing”
@nhillustation
Do The Thing
Press pause on the pressures and the stresses.
They mount regardless.
Don’t spend this time consuming the garbage that shackles our collective imagination.
Channel the creativity that the world is missing.
Connect to that which is important, not popular.
Because, right now, the court of public opinion is under quarantine.
Adjourned until further notice.
Our creative gifts only have the creators themselves to please.
If this wild dream reveals a reality ripped at the seams, I won’t look past the seamstress.
If the charts show downward trends, I won’t look to the investors.
I will look to the artists. To the imaginations who see a spectrum of colours beyond red and green.
To the minds who don’t think in black and white.
Those plotting the unthinkable.
Something 4-dimensional.
I’ll back the dreamers who get excited about a canvas finally blank again, ready to be launched into an almighty spurt of something utterly new.
And I will be part of this new dawn of artists, musicians, poets, scientists, engineers, architects - creators of all stripes - collaborating for a healthier, better, brighter tomorrow.
I’m just getting started with my Art form. Right now. Simply because I have nothing better to do.
But what is better than doing what you’re best at?
Why did it take for the end of the world to get started?
Solitude is a bliss best used to figure out who you are, and how to express the thing.
Doing the thing is not for everyone.
But it’s not for anyone until it’s done.
Art Trumps Content
In a world of Art, time alone is paradise.
But we don’t live in a world of Art anymore.
We live in a world of Content. Our daily dose of alienation.
Quality lost to satisfy our rate of consumption.
Self-isloation, the final metaphor for the suffering of the soul.
Content, brought to you by everyone.
Yet, already, a few days in, even this is running low.
Proof of the fickle, unfulfilling sustenance it always was.
“Me time” - now, that’s contentedness.
A Zeitgeist turned upside down - now, that’s an opportunity.
Designing the future - now, that’s worthwhile.
Forced incarceration, sure.
But self-reflection on a global scale is exactly the meditative practice we need on the precipice of uninhabitability.
If we return to the mean, terrifying, murderous state of affairs after this apocalypse-taster, it will be because good artists did nothing.
Because big imaginations closed off, lost to despair, right when we need them most.
So when, in a time not far from now, when we can embrace again - collaborate and celebrate once more - we can share the findings from our internal explorations of self.
A time used to ponder what we took for granted.
How exciting the thought of the next random act of kindness.
How meaningful a handshake is.
How important hugs are.
How locking lips is the manifestation of love, not the kiss of death.
The Canvas is blank.
Pages unwritten.
Ideas that seemed set in stone are free to be sculpted once more.
Crazy, how unprepared we were for the vacuousness of our artificial purpose.
Uncanny, that the only ones that could envision the magnitude of our epoch defining moment were storytellers.
Thus, when the doors burst open again, our future will be in the hands of those who pick up the tools first.
Hence, those locked away, scribbling away, strumming away, sketching away - thinking, meditating, imagining - the stories, songs and creations of tomorrow will not just survive.
They will thrive.
From outcasts to decision makers in a single lonesome moment.
And we will all emerge to a new world.
A World Created In A Time Of Corona.