For the most part in our time of history we live in a rational society (at least in theory), governed by fact, rules, strict boundaries and edges around things, parties, convictions, agendas…no matter how interdisciplinary we’d like to consider ourselves or our niche. The amount of data today has become so large that there are very few individuals that could take it upon themselves to equally well master physics, medicine, poetry, astronomy… So this new age of reason (to which the new age movement was born as counterbalance) has the proclivity to construct rational systems for itself. No matter how subjective the chosen medium of expression might be in any given personality and how distorted the idea/prophecy is through the self of the artist, true artists are the only ones who answer to no one and nothing except the highest order of pure idea and concept and by this alone they are untarnished by what is “proper” and show you what is “true” beyond the “convenient truths” of today.

They see what you still can’t until they show it to you, while even the philosophers are tapping in the dark until an idea is fully formed and incorporated because they lack the terminology to explain. But an artist needs no consensus of terms to act. (Good) artists, using any tool available, are those who see the furthest. They are not ditsy frivolous Peter Pan types who have never learnt to incorporate the reality within themselves or have somehow failed to accept the real demands of “graduate-work-retire-die” paradigm of capitalism. An intelligent artist will show you (if you listen) the things that are so far down on the horizon that they need and only can be expressed as art because there is still no rational construct within which they can be explained by arguments and facts to be accepted within a larger whole.

The fact that you’re living in a society and that you’re grouped with other people already means that many of the truths you feel will have to be stifled for the “greater good”, that many of your idiosyncrasies will be pushed down and deemed as sub optimal and undesirable things to get rid of (or fetishize quietly to be enjoyed in your own four walls) if they are not useful to the whole. You will be deemed insufficient if your values are not exactly aligned with the values of your society. Even the most egalitarian large system is still a system and therefore oppressive because it values some things over others, so things will need to be repressed and all that is repressed and not allowed to be will fester and swell up until it explodes, it will come back as a far more sinister symptom. Art is what, simultaneously to being a pointer of what is to come, serves as a release of all that was not allowed to be and in turn caused collective anxiety. Anxiety is the same as enslavement and as long as you have a voice you cannot be enslaved.

You might not be that adapt to voicing your agenda but from the first era of man among the hunters, gatherers and growling sounds of a tribe there were always artists, and no matter how big the tribe gets there always will be. They see things differently, they see more, they’re more sensitive to the shifts and feel things on multiple levels you cannot access. They are the people who understand that the search is just as valid and sacred as finding the object of your quest. The advantages of science and technology might make your life easier or save your physical body but the artist saves your soul and psyche and you’re atoned for the sin of being the part of the problem by listening, understanding and appreciating.