Art of War - War of Art
Art as an act of defiance
As so many, I love reading the classics as an insight into strategies. I often come away with some nuggets of gold I feel I can put to relevant use. But I also come away with a nagging feeling that the premise of this book is one of fighting an enemy. This is the same feeling I get from political rhetoric or business or the news cycle. We are gravitating towards conflict, because we somehow believe it is in the conflict we can find the truth, the right price and reveal what people are made of.
As a composer of music, I daily approach matters in an alternative way, by looking for the good stuff and exploring these golden threads and caring less about what does not catch my eye. It is similar to the exercise in drama workshops of saying ‘yes’ to other people’s suggestions. Of course, there is an element of testing what I have found but it is always most powerful if I care more about what is good rather than bad, simplistically put. I follow leads down tunnels and mazes where I feel there is fresh air, light, a glimmer of excitement, a spark. The only enemy I have on this white-water rafting is my own fear and insecurities. My main ally is naivety.
We are well into an age where subjectivism is dominant, and this can lead to a bit of uncertainty in the kantian camp of finding an unshakeable core and expanding from it. I would suggest then, that rather seeing subjective truth as a threat to factual truth, it can be viewed as a comeback for the old storytelling ways. And the storyteller cannot be separated from the story he or she is telling.
I believe the tools we need to navigate in this potential maze of subjectivity come to us from the realm of art. We need to engage our artistic mindset, our lateral thinking, and realise that any time we present facts we need to make them come alive. Art cannot be neutral or objective, but then again maybe nothing can anyway.
Art is an antidote to chaos because artists always look for connections. A prerequisite is the belief that there is something that holds this world together, something worth looking for. I often feel that these connections cannot be wrangled from the hands of reality by aggression and conflict but rather carefully and with a gentle and believing mindset call it forth. And this takes practice, to let go of cynicism. If you want to see the ugly things in the world, you can be sure you will find them. But with the same token, if you make yourself open to beauty you will see an abundance of it.
I would suggest that the wars and conflicts we see in the world today are based in battles of narratives. We see this in Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine, we see it in the climate debate, we see it in the US, in Europe, and everywhere. My belief is that at the core of us as societies and individuals there is a wordless space where the magma of our souls flows powerfully. The tectonic plates of the day-to-day, the business decisions, the political directions, the life choices all surf on this red-hot undercurrent. I believe honest art can speak to this molten identity and hence shape our societies profoundly. Art is a weapon.
This is why I believe there is now a war of art on our doorstep. It goes beyond echo chambers and information warfare and maybe this is where the battle always has been fought. My hope is that we could focus more on what is worth fighting for instead of against, and that our knives might be reshaped to pencils and musical instruments.
So, what would happen if we went out as individuals, as an army, as a tide, and looked for the magnificent, hunted for the connections that bind reality together, picked up a flower, let water run through our hands, looked someone in the eye? These are acts of defiance, of storytelling, of re-imagining. The war of art is here and we are fighting for our identities. Let’s all win in the war of art.
