Sense Making

Can the artist contribute to sense making? Can the artist help humanity as a whole make sense of the world we live in? I believe the answer is yes. In fact, for all of human history I believe this has been the central role of the artist. However, since lets say modernism, I believe that on the whole art has only contributed to the obfuscation of reality. In other words, art has only contributed to making the world more difficult to understand. Time and time again I’m told by the casual observer, “I don’t get art, it’s not for me”. How can it be that a purely visual form of communication that requires no literacy or deep cultural knowledge has become mute to those who are neither illiterate nor without an understanding of the culture they inhabit? We are currently living through an unprecedented time in human history. A time when we need all the help we can get to make sense of the current situation and one of the tools we’ve relied on for sense making since the dawn of human culture is broken. Art in this moment is doing all it can to make itself irrelevant.