A Rough and Timeless Beauty

The writer Sarah Lemon probably spoke for many creatives when she posted on Instagram recently, ​“It feels so dumb to be an artist when the world needs real help, but art saved me more than once, like a lamp handed to me in the dark, so I aim to pass along that light.”

Artists are notoriously prone to that sort of self-doubt. Sadly, so are many arts donors. I encountered Lemon’s comment in a recent MLive column by Kentucky poet Lucie Brooks, in which she lamented a post-election flight of donor money from the arts to ​“more important” causes. 

This moment, Brooks argued, is precisely when donors should be leaning in to support the arts, not abandoning them. She offered evidence for how the arts and artists drive economic activity, create jobs, generate tax revenue, improve children’s academic performance, strengthen mental health, promote civic engagement, and fortify social tolerance. 

The person who forwarded Brooks’ column to me, Jamie Bennett, and his fellow American for the Arts co-CEO Suzy Delvalle recently penned their own column asserting the value of the arts for ​“The Art Newspaper.” Citing the example of public support in Minnesota, they argued that funding the arts (alongside the environment and recreation) produces happier, healthier, and more cohesive communities. 

Bennett and Delvalle see a role for the arts in addressing multiple contemporary challenges, ​“from revitalizing rural economies to addressing the nation’s epidemic of loneliness to connecting more Americans with our national parks and waterways.” But the most significant, they believe, involves ​“all the ways that artists and arts organizations can help America build an even bigger ​‘we,’ one expansive enough to include all of us….” 

I believe in all of this. Profoundly. And not just in the fraught aftermath of a contentious election. At Prebys in recent years, we have launched major grantmaking initiatives explicitly supporting the capacity of the arts to build community, strengthen belonging, bridge differences, support youth mental health, inspire creativity, and revitalize place. We have lauded the power of the arts to help create the greater, vastly more inclusive ​“we” that we know is possible. 

I am grateful to impassioned advocates like Bennett, Delvalle, and Brooks for stepping so quickly into the breach to defend the arts against those who might want to defund them, be those policymakers or funders. The threat they see is real, and the case they make on behalf of the arts is inspiring and demonstrably true. 

And yet. 

Something is missing for me in these arguments, in part because they feel like such a reaction to this particular moment, in part because they risk sugarcoating the arts in a safe container of benign social utility. 

Questions about the relevance of the arts are hardy perennials that resurface whenever the needs of the times — budget challenges, climate change, racial inequality, homelessness, hunger — feel overwhelming and ask us to turn our attention elsewhere. The dynamic Brooks describes is an old story in philanthropy. In my decades in this work, I have seen the arts suffer at the hands of budget-cutting and censorious policymakers, without question, but I have also seen them suffer at the hands of donors and advocates convinced that art is a frivolity in the face of whatever priority suddenly seems more pressing. 

In her ​“The Quiet Life” newsletter (Nov. 5, 2024), Susan Cain offers a beautiful commentary on this Hobbesian choice. She tells the story of a famous lecture that the writer and WWI veteran C.S. Lewis delivered at Oxford on the eve of WWII, answering the question: Does beauty matter when bombs start falling? 

His emphatic and unequivocal answer was yes. ​“Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice,” he said, questioning the choice itself. ​“Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself…. We are mistaken when we compare war with ​‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.” 

The beauty that Lewis was describing — the beauty that comes to us through art, culture, and I would argue nature — was an encounter with the divine that is anything but safe. We have all experienced it. It stirs a longing in the soul for something greater and better. It beckons us to transformation. 

It is the rough beauty of awe and wonder and insight. 

Which, Cain argues in her essay, is no mere ​“frippery” in challenging times. “[T]hese moments of approaching the sublime mean more than anything else that might ever happen to us. And maybe the precipice is the reason WHY they mean so much. Maybe the sublime is what points us away from the precipice; maybe it’s what guides us in the direction of ​‘the beautiful and perfect world’, the one we feel so improvably sure is out there somewhere.” 

That understanding is, for me, essential to any defense of the arts, now and always. Yes, it may be a tough case to make to a righteous policy maker or a frightened donor. But without it, the other arguments for the arts are incomplete and ultimately misleading, because they all derive their power and truth from the same common root, which is the singular capacity of the arts to jolt us into new and inspired ways of seeing the world around us, the moment before us, the people across from us, and perhaps most importantly, ourselves. 

Do we need the arts right now? You bet we do. 

But instead of falling into the trap of arguing that supporting the arts matters ​“now more than ever,” we should acknowledge instead that it doesn’t. We need to get comfortable again with the idea that it matters as much as it always has, stretching all the way back to our earliest history and the first time one of our ancestors pressed a hand to a cave wall and blew chalk around it. 

We need to remember again a truth that we can ill afford to forget. As Lewis said, ​“Life has never been normal.” The entire history of our species and its many, many communities is one of millions of lamps — some blazing and bright, some flickering and barely visible — being handed along in the swirling darkness, helping us to find our way. 

That’s not dumb — it’s salvation. And it’s worth supporting, not just now but always.