The Proper Task of Life: How Art Can Save the Soul of Humankind – Keith Gilmore
A beautiful little audio/article on what art's good for 🎶
Here's a long quote to set the scene:
"It doesn’t take a long hard look to see that our culture is in crisis. Or more accurately, that our culture is sick. This isn’t a judgment; what I mean is that the culture has a sickness. Yet every sickness has its symptoms, root causes, and avenues of treatment or amelioration. What then is the nature of the sickness that is afflicting culture?
What we live among is what we interface with daily. This goes without saying. In our current culture we live in cities with crowded high rises, in towns with soulless strip malls, surrounded by billboard advertisements. We live in homes filled with plastic trinkets and the omnipresent glow of screens. We walk on streets littered with garbage. We have to take a drive to become immersed in nature. This may not be everyone’s story, but it’s the predominant story of our time.
We work at factories producing meaningless plastic stuff—or in cubicles designing or selling it— all the while feeling that we’re wasting our time. We sit in front of the TV and are advertised to, relentlessly distracted, and told by newsreaders how terrible and dangerous life is. We sit behind computers and phones and are advertised to moreso, dazed by infinite algorithmic suggestions, and reminded how unattractive and miserable we are compared to contrived figments.
Is it any wonder that we ourselves are sick? We share in a cultural illusion that assures us, “Just find the right trinket to take up the right space and you will become whole. Just become the right cog inside the right machine and you’ll finally belong”.
In the face of it all, we know in our hearts that none of this is right. In our moments of clarity, when the clouds of our sick culture’s phantom disperse, and the sunlight shines on our true human selves, we understand that the situation we’re in is untenable and intolerable. Still, the scope of the situation is enormous. Are we afraid to ask what even can be done?"
