More often than not, I learn about the outbreaks of geopolitical or military conflict straight from my X feed, no matter how much algorithmic hygiene I try to maintain. And usually it’s not through a coherent article, but through a collective reaction that functions as a coping mechanism. Memes. Memes about everything from AI takeovers, to WW3, to red candle seasonal depression, and so on.
Remember the one where the world is burning in the background and Will Ferrell appears shouting something like: “Anybody want to buy a painting?”
Hilarious...especially when you consider how much fear and narrowness can hide inside a joke like that. Another brick — or at least a handful of mortar — added to the monument dedicated to the slow decay of the collective perception of the artist’s role in society. We all laugh while some keep punching downward, hiding behind fragile keyboard warrior fingers.
This is not whining for attention. It would be if this were about sales or the lack of public attention — something most artists have long since made peace with anyway. We are, in many ways, the bottom dwellers.
What I’m pointing at instead is a systemic trivialization of art’s role in society, somewhere between the tired bipolarity of the pretty-picture maker cliche on one side and the hyper-intellectualized artistic act on the other.
What happens in practice is a subtle but persistent diminishing of these voices in the public space — people who spend most of their time reading, thinking, analyzing concepts, informing themselves, training that small but stubborn muscle of critical thought. Their voices end up flattened by a media environment built around easily digestible sensationalism: content designed to shock just enough to capture attention, but not enough to provoke deeper thought.
The logic is simple: the less cognitive engagement, the better. Critical thinking slows the scroll, and a slowed scroll distracts from the targeted advertisements embedded beside the news.
Artists are often pushed back into their lane with remarks like: “He’s a good painter, sure. Or a good actor. But maybe he should shut the fuck up with all these opinions about peace in the Middle East.”
As if the artist isn’t also a citizen embedded in the same reality as Namey McNameface — sticky fingers on a keyboard, reposting stolen memes. Maybe the artist has spent days, weeks, or months studying the issue. Maybe the artist has built an entire exhibition, a lecture, or a body of work around that theme.
But Namey McNameface gets amplified.
Because Mr. McNameface triggers an instant and emotional haha, in opposition to the artist’s perspective, which asks for more than three seconds to be understood.
I know I know we sound like broken records but that don't make it not true.
It’s redundant to say who wins the information arms race in this new kind of cold war.
It’s redundant to say who wins the information arms race in this new kind of cold war.
And yet there is something profoundly powerful in witnessing, almost in real time, a few hurried lines of poetry on a rushed guitar chord from Syrian musicians exiled by war. Or a protest sign painted by an art student in Kyiv during the Maidan protests — paint still wet, the voice and hand still trembling.
You feel the moment while it’s boiling up.
I would bet those accounts from the ground have aged far better than most sterile press statements delivered from comfortable media studios. In the end, they often paint a truer picture of a conflict, which in turn legitimizes the artistic act through something extremely simple: provenance. Boots-on-the-ground credibility.
So yes, anyone should want to buy a fuckin painting with flames in the background. It’s called empathy. It’s called showing up. It’s called patronage.
Anyone can tell me to get off the internet if I can’t take a joke, but this type of borderline puerile rhetoric can genuinely discourage the rawer artistic gestures — especially those still at the beginning of their path, not yet accustomed to the gratuitous hostility of the online environment. And behind those artistic gestures there is, more often than not, a well-intentioned person trying, in their own limited way, to push back against violence.
Who defends the authentic voice of people if not artists and independent journalists? It certainly isn’t being defended by mainstream media.
A clear historical example comes from the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996), when journalist and writer Zlatko Dizdarević documented everyday life inside a city under bombardment in his book Sarajevo: A War Journal. Rather than focusing on military strategy or battlefield movements, Dizdarević wrote about crossing streets exposed to snipers, about the absence of water and electricity, about the strange normality of conversations taking place while shells fell around the city.
His journal became a chronicle of civilian existence under siege.
If official archives record battles, texts like his preserve something equally — if not more — important for the collective imagination of hope and human resilience: the memory of how people continued to survive in the middle of destruction, offering a measure of hope to those who today find themselves facing the same brutal realities of war.
You don't have to pick up a weapon, because you already have one.