“The more time we spend visiting places that others have described, the more we follow the paths others have made, reading what we’re told, seeing what the algorithm recommends, listening to what crowd-sources admire and eating what’s already been photographed, tasted, marketed and measured, the less capacity we have to see what we didn’t expect, to hear what we weren’t told about or to ask questions that haven’t already been answered. We lose our own perspective and imagination and in this everyone is impoverished: ourselves and anyone who looks to us in vain for fresh insight or understanding.” Margaret Heffernan

Three more charcoal and pencil drawings

And,  I’d also like to share a big part of Margaret Heffernan’s chapter around art and living with the uncertainty and ambiguity intrinsic in life with the title: Living the Questions from her book: Uncharted: How to Map the Future, in which she explores questions.

“How is it that Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck, written in Italy 135 years ago by a fussy, middle-aged Norwegian man, holds this cosmopolitan audience rapt? …….. Artists are frequently ahead – that’s what avant-garde means – but what makes that possible? How does art stay relevant in times and circumstances well beyond any future its makers could have imagined? What is it about the way that artists live and work that puts them in touch with ideas and themes that last so long? What lasts is, to some degree, random or accidental. We don’t know whether ancient Greece had greater playwrights than Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Euripides, only that they are the ones whose work has been discovered. You need only look at ads for wildly hyped but now forgotten authors in the back of old books to see how ephemeral art can be. But all generations go back to art, discovering or rediscovering sources of meaning and insight that their makers could never have planned. There’s no evidence that artists contemplate ‘future proofing’ – artists don’t see the future as something to manipulate or guard against – yet we look to them for insight, perspective, ways to understand our own times that they themselves did not know. And, in work made decades, centuries, millennia ago, we find what we’re looking for. Read more…. Notes