Can art make us better humans? What is contentment? What is enough? Making 35 000 euros a year makes you part of the 3,5% richest people in the world. Such a position comes with a larger responsibility regarding the devastation caused to our planet. Can we learn the art of giving up, and how?
We can’t solve the problem of the climate crisis without thinking about what happiness is. Art functions as a mediator between inner experience and the outside world. Through painting, music, dance, literature and other forms, artists give shape to emotions, ideas and identities, inventing and recombining forms to make new meanings, translating subjective feelings into shared symbols.
Rather than restricting deliberation to the mere setting of a room where to sit and negotiate, deliberation about what constitutes a good life can also happen through the senses.
As a mediating force, art connects people and communities, opens channels for dialogue, challenges assumptions and fosters empathy and understanding.
Embodied, sensuous forms of knowing can have restorative effects, enabling reconciliation and the forging of common ground. In this way, art can help cultivate a renewed ethic of care that orients action toward living within planetary limits.
Similar to a Citizens’ Assembly, expressing shared grievances and aspirations through art helps concentrate attention on what matters and build a common vision despite differing political views and backgrounds. Thus art is a potent mechanism for fostering acceptance and agreement—paradoxically doing so by showing that there is no single, absolute truth about the world.
CULTIVATING ART
I want to build on the notion of “cultivation” that the visual artist André Feliciano introduced to me during a brief encounter at his gallery in Sao Paulo while I was there to see a photoshoot and mingle. I met him through my Cuban neighbours in Vila Madalena, the remarkably talented visual artists Luis Enrique Silvestre Guerra and Ania Valle.
Artists tend to know other artists, and these networks continuously generate new readings of the world we encounter—readings we might experience daily yet too readily dismiss as mere entertainment.
Rather than overt attempts to confront “the system” or to stake a claim for social justice, cultivation is about proposing different ways of doing things.
Feliciano contends that growing awareness of climate change has transformed our experience of time. While nature once survived without human interference, in the Anthropocene it has come to resemble a garden that requires our stewardship. Artists must therefore rethink their role during this planetary crisis: simply exhibiting work in a gallery is no longer enough.
Instead, artists should act like gardeners, cultivating art within people’s lives. To this end, Feliciano introduces the idea of “Floraissance art” created by an “art gardener.” An art gardener might, for instance, create a birthday song performed in a new way. Central to this practice is embedding an educational component so the artwork — like the reimagined song — can be reproduced. If the song is replicated often enough in different forms, it becomes part of a cultural process.
Cultivation is crucial for expanding acceptance of climate policies. The ethical alignment promoted by cultivation can aid a transition to a post-growth future, as it might also appeal to relatively advantaged people, those in the top 3.5%.