My favorite painting, Gustave Doré’s Enigma hangs in the space between what we know and what we refuse to understand. There’s something perfectly fitting about that for this moment in human history. Doré rendered mystery itself—that haunting sense that truth exists just beyond the frame, waiting to be acknowledged or forever evaded. And isn’t that precisely where we find ourselves? The enigma of art and climate change, of beauty and apocalypse, of the question “what are we fighting for?” echoing through museums and protest alike.

Today, people literally throw soup at masterpieces and call it dissent, but Van Gogh survived vandalism better than coral reefs will survive this century. And somewhere in that paradox—that desperate, almost comic contradiction—is where art lives now. In the absurdity of the moment.

Here’s the bittersweet part: we’ve proven that art moves people. Olafur Eliasson’s glacial ice exhibition in Paris wasn’t data—it was something you could touch. And people felt it. But feeling something and doing something remain stubbornly unacquainted. We have 100 million people watching David Attenborough’s documentary about the collapse of the world, and we still can’t quite manage collective action. It’s like we’ve collectively agreed to stand in a museum admiring the painting while the building burns around us.

Yet—and this is where I plant my flag—art might be the only thing radical and free enough for what’s coming. Not because it solves things. It doesn’t. It won’t. But because it makes the unspeakable speakable. Comedy breaks through the numbness. Performance creates spaces where we can imagine differently. Street art on a wall reaches people that policy papers never will. And sometimes, a comedian’s joke cuts deeper than a thousand scientific studies.

So what do we do with Doré’s Enigma? We stop treating the mystery as optional. We accept that art won’t save us in the way carbon offsets won’t save us. But it might do something more important: it might transform us in ways that actually matter. Art refuses easy answers, it holds despair and hope in the same frame, that makes people uncomfortable enough to look inward. Stories change culture. Culture changes behavior. And behavior—eventually, painfully, too slowly—might change the trajectory.

Gustave Doré understood that mystery doesn’t require resolution to be powerful. It just requires witnesses. And perhaps that’s all we can ask of art right now: to make us witnesses to our own moment, whether we’re ready or not.

Thank you for witnessing this episode, my bet is still on us, humans.

Until next time…goodbye!