And today’s reason we are an endangered species is: art. No, not the “movies” you see on tiktok or the slur of paint smeared across a canvas by some instagram celebrity who dipped her arm elbow deep in yellow paint and calls it painting, or the half-baked essay handed in by your “genius” of a high school sophomore, copy/pasted ten minutes before history class from his phone’s ChatGPT app he hides in a folder called “Brain”. Although some might claim these are all art, I beg to differ. I myself can’t give you a clear definition of what art is, but I’m sure it is worth living for and there were people in history who also argued it was worth dying for. Some say it’s holy, some say it is what the soul is made of. Then again, some say soy milk is milk, so…

There are a million ways to go about defining art and depending on which definition you go with, its purpose may also differ. Is it for soul-searchers? Is it a propaganda tool? Is it the dimwitted toy of the petit bourgeoisie? I can’t and won’t pretend to have the courage to even define it myself, so what I’ll do instead is rely on minds much greater than my own to see what they thought about what we’re faced with.

Bertold Brecht thinks “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” Well, fairly straight forward, then again, he did write The Threepenny Opera and had his Marxist leanings, what the hell did he know? He’d throw the bathwater out with the baby.

John Cheever, American novelist often known as the Chekhov of the Suburbs said “Art is the triumph over chaos.” So when will we let art take over completely? I could use a little less chaos and a little more art. Perhaps we all could…

And modern day heroes like Banksy come along, who say things like “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. In its essence, once again, anti-establishment. But then again, all art is. If art is not the system, then it is not art: it is propaganda.

One of my all time favorite painters, Marc Chagall said “Great art picks up where nature ends.” Although I know he did not mean it like that, but let’s hope we won’t get to nature’s end entirely, because the pace at which current society is headed for the end of nature, there won’t be anything left for art to pick up.

Plato, on the other hand said that an artist’s work is a “shadow of the divine perfection”. To that, I say: let’s bring it out into the light We’ve been hiding perfection for too long and our time seems to be rather limited.

Now, you don’t need to take any of these great definitions to heart. By all means, create your own. Just do this one thing, if you please: recognize that us, humans, of all species have been gifted with this incredible talent of creating things out of our imagination. Let’s thrive for imagining something better, then, and not something so much worse that we’ll end up saying: it’s so terrible, you can’t even imagine.