Art in times of crisis

Reflections on representation, violence, and the need for sensitivity

Lately, not a week goes by without this question coming back to me: does art still serve any purpose? What’s the point of creating today, in the quiet of a studio, when entire regions are being devastated and human and political emergencies keep piling up? Isn’t it a form of denial to keep searching for beauty (and by beauty I don’t mean mere aesthetics, but harmony) when the horizon keeps darkening?

And yet, I’m not so sure that creating, reflecting, searching for form, is so far removed from engagement. It seems to me that any attempt to make others feel, rather than explain, is a way of resisting indifference.

Of course, we cannot simply aestheticize reality. We should not turn misery into decor, or suffering into a visual motif. There is a need for clarity, a necessity not to look away. But in a world oversaturated with brutal images and narratives, maybe there’s still space for a more sensitive voice. One that does not rely on shock or confrontation. Not to soften or avoid, but to remind us of what remains human beneath the facts.

To expose without violence, to suggest without diluting: that requires a fragile balance, but one that is possible. And within that gesture, I believe, lies a form of responsibility.

In Hidden Art, Aude de Kerros traces the history of institutional contemporary art and questions its tendency to exhibit the raw, the shocking, the violent. According to her, this aesthetic of shock does not stem from humanism, but from a form of symbolic violence. The artwork becomes a scream launched to exist in a saturated space, at a time when slow emotion and contemplation are often pushed to the margins. She speaks of an “extreme realism”, where suffering and ugliness are laid bare without any transformation or transcendence — and which, paradoxically, ends up desensitizing rather than awakening the viewer. This phenomenon doesn’t only concern art or the media. It reflects a broader way of seeing the world that has crept in over time, almost without notice. And since violence, even symbolic, only calls for more violence, we find ourselves caught in a spiral of increasingly harsh images, consumed as fleeting sensory stimulation. Jean Baudrillard wrote: “There is no longer any representation; there is only simulation. Reality has become a secondary operator in a system that functions independently of it.” In other words: images no longer show the world, they absorb it until they become more real than reality itself.

There are works that “demonstrate”, and those that “touch”. Some impose ideas; others transmit a presence. And today, I feel that showing alone is no longer enough. We must find ways to feel again.

I still believe in art. Not as an answer to crisis, but as a form of presence. A thread, an impulse, perhaps a witness. Some artists manage to move us deeply, even though they lived in other centuries and other worlds. They are rare, they always have been.

I’m not one of them. But still, it feels right to question what I do. To try and find, in the spaces between things, a way to express what moves me, what outrages me, what I’d like to defend without giving up on poetry. For someone like me, born into this visual saturation, it is not instinctive. It is a practice of attention, a constant effort that goes against my culture and reflexes. How to get there? I’m not entirely sure. Sometimes it is the deepness of a gaze in an otherwise ordinary portrait, a single brushstroke that breaks the balance of an image, the vast silence of a landscape, colors that meet or resist each other. A call to melancholy, to empathy, to surrender.Each of us must find our own language.

As with travel, which I often write about here, we must relearn how to dwell in slowness, in silence, in retreat. To walk, to write, to observe to keep a certain emptiness from taking hold. The kind that, sooner or later, might completely disconnect us from the world and make us amune to its destruction.

References

• Aude de Kerros, Hidden Art: The Dissidents of Contemporary Art, 2007

• Regis Debray, Life and Death of the Image: A History of the Gaze in the West, 1992

• David Le Breton, La saveur du monde. Une anthropologie des sens, 2006

• Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf war did not take place, 1991