Art is water for changemaking

I may have been bullying artists recently.

Or, perhaps, I have been excessively compelling changemakers who are capable of making art to do so. Either way, a poet, a satirist, a couple of painters, and an occasional dancer have been subjected to fervent appeals that their therapists may eventually hear about.

Please make art. Please do not underestimate what it does the world.

The longer I study changemaking, the more convinced I become that art is one of civilization’s oldest changemaking technologies — and one whose powers we have persistently underestimated.

Changemaking demands strategy, competency, meticulous process, and masterful execution. These reshape the conditions around people: institutions, incentives, relationships, resources, and systems. They matter enormously. However, meaningful change also expects something of the people moving through it. It asks us to loosen identities, certainties, loyalties, fears, griefs, and hopes. It asks us to become capable of inhabiting a future that does not yet exist.

This journey cannot be engineered. It must be imagined and experienced. And that is where art comes in.

A private place to meet ourselves

Art changes the conditions within people, but not by issuing instructions, winning arguments, or demanding agreement.

When societies know who they are, art celebrates. When societies know what they are fighting, art mobilizes. But when people can no longer make sense of themselves —when decent people are unsure whether to take pride or shame in their private thoughts — art becomes something else entirely. It becomes a kind place for an unmasked meeting with ourselves.

Public life has become remarkably poor at holding such encounters. It demands conclusions before we have woven an understanding. It rewards declarations and treats uncertainty as weakness, guilt, or evasion.

Art asks something quieter of us. It asks us to stay. To remain by an unfolding idea. With an authentic moment. Inside a paradox. Despite the urge to run.

A poem, a song, a dance, a painting, a novel, or a satirical sketch may quietly ask: Is this what you want? Is this who you want to be? The gift of art is that no one ever has to hear our answers.