The widespread outrage towards modern (abstract) art is caused by a misunderstanding of meaning or perhaps anti-intellectual rejection of it. Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome, 1961 at face value is a large blue canvas. That’s what the critic would say. But, as the Museum of Modern Art suggests,

Klein famously declared the blue sky to be his first artwork and from there continued finding radical new ways to represent the infinite and immaterial in his works. One such strategy was monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas. Klein saw monochrome painting as an “open window to freedom, as the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of color.”

To find these descriptive words that paint a picture (hehe) which imbue the artwork with meaning, is a talent in itself. The artwork is the vessel for meaning. If you sever the story and humanity behind these pieces, you’re left with the boring bare reality of the piece — resin pigment on canvas. If, however, you’re able to suspend this cynicism that often comes with adulthood and allow yourself to be drawn in by the story, by the infinite blue, you might find yourself in a state of child-like curiosity. It’s art in its many forms that allow us to dream outside of the physical realm and keeps that spark of wonder from dissolving.

This is not something AI art will be able to conquer. As a response to backlash following a wave of AI-generated images in the style of Studio Ghibli, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI claimed during a YouTube podcast, that the “democratization of creating content has been a big net win for society”. The insinuation being that the creation of art has just now been made available to the everyman, that even you - yes you! - could make art, thanks to our gracious AI overlords.

The fallacy is that we are in no shortage of technically talented artists. In fact, we as a society are almost completely unwilling to pay artists who are technically talented at art, but tell no story, except for the incredibly exceptional (i.e. photo-realistic artists drawing Coke cans). What has, and will always be the decider, is the ability to tell a story. That’s not something you can go to school for, nor something where you can simply “put the hours in”. In fact, any attempt to apply a so-called “grindset mentality” would actively oppose such progress. The depth of experience and the reservoir of emotion the artist can draw from life is the art.

it’s no wonder, then, why so many of humanity’s greatest artists struggled with depression, were social outcasts, or went through herculean adversity. These are the times when we need art the most. The struggle to find meaning becomes a necessity to living till the next day. We need to have a sense of meaning in the world, otherwise we quickly fall apart scrambling for it, often looking to vapid pleasures. I liken this category of art as something similar to accessibility features in software. I may never need subtitles or keyboard navigation as much as the deaf or blind do, but when I’m in the train trying not to disturb anyone, or when my screen breaks and I’m desperately trying to find a way to save my work, I’m so, so thankful that it exists. In the same vein, I will never understand the depth of what is written as the writer does, but maybe, even if just a little, I can grasp at what they saw in the world.

Stories are the lens through we view reality. You ever notice how when you’re watching sports, in the quiet parts of the match, the commentators will always bring up things like historical performance or team rivalries, or what each player is trying to prove? That’s all spinning a narrative. None of that means anything unless you’re in the space, being absorbed by the fans, the atmosphere, the game. It’s also why sports can be astronomically boring if you’re simply a passer-by. I used to watch League of Legends Esports, and it’s the same story (hehe) everywhere.

“European team Fnatic, once world champions, have fallen into a slump for years, but joined by the rising star Nemesis, they look like they have a fighting chance!”

“Faker going into this match, which means so much to him, having been knocked out by SSG last year is now looking to reclaim that trophy and prove to everyone that he’s still deserving of the world stage.”

Sorry to disappoint but I made up these two quotes, though I hope you see the truth in them. These are lenses to view the match through, when they’re clicking furiously around the screen it doesn’t matter what they’re doing, it matters what it means to them and the world. Every pass in a football game, every goal, every save, everything becomes meaningful. When a big match is lost by a split-second mistake and the consensus is that their career is over, only for them to have a record-breaking run the following season, we feel that. And when they overcome that challenge the next time it faces them, we connect with that incredible wash of satisfaction, relief and adrenaline that comes with it, because we were there. We followed their story, we supported them and their team through it all, and we believed. And that is the work of a good story.

There are a growing number of women who have an active distain for men. I ask for empathy here. These men were once boys, who, by no choice of their own severed their emotional self. It was society that said that a boy who has a connection to their inner emotions is unfit to be a man. The natural state of being is to be in touch with one’s feelings, to value irrationality, symbolism, gestures. To need emotional safety just as much as material security.

Consider the very ethically questionable Cloth Mother/Wire Mother Experiment conducted by American psychologist Harry F Harlow in 1958. While producing some of the most harrowing images I’ve seen, this experiment also produced some interesting findings. …Though obviously I would’ve preferred such an ethically apprehensible experiment not to have been run at all.

The experiment separated infant monkeys from their mother immediately after conception, placing them in cages with two chambers, each with its own “mother”; inanimate effigies made from wood and wire, with one covered with cloth, the other left bare. In one variation of the experiment, the wire mother was given a milk bottle for the monkeys to drink from, with the cloth mother providing nothing.

Maybe unsurprisingly, the monkeys vastly preferred spending time with the cloth mother, only leaving to get milk as necessity. Though the research methods of the 1950s are far less rigorous than current day; to take this finding at face value we would then make the abstraction that human touch provided value beyond the strictly practical warmth of touch, it soothed and comforted. If we take into account the rest of his experiments we are led to understand comfort as a prerequisite to growth, and particularly, growing into a well-adjusted adult.

When we deny boys this emotional reliance on their mothers and loved ones and force them down the path of utility, we are raising them not the be well rounded humans, but soldiers. Feminist Bell Hooks writes in her book The Will to Change:

Until we are willing to question many of the specifics of the male sex role, including most of the seven norms and stereotypes that psychologist Robert Levant names in a listing of its chief constituents — ‘avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality’ — we are going to deny men their full humanity.

In Harvard psychologist William S. Pollack’s paper, Male Adolescent Rites of Passage, Pollack asserts that most boys experience a harsh developmental trauma as a result of premature separation from their mothers, which in turn leads to deficits in intimacy, empathy and the ability to commit to a partner. This trauma is then exacerbated by a socialization process that teaches boys to suppress and deny feelings of vulnerability and tenderness.

Society over the last few decades have made sweeping adjustments of what is expected of the modern woman but simultaneously has barely budged on what makes a man, I believe due to masculinity being held in higher value than its counterpart. We are continuing to create lopsided men who learn to use a hammer every task.

When women say that men are bad lovers, often they point to a lack of respect for and understanding of symbolic gestures of love. The wildly successful (though deeply flawed) relationship counselling book, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, written by John Gray in 1992, posits that men often complain that they offer solutions to problems to women in their lives who complain to them. That these women are not looking for solutions but understanding and reassurance.

Frankly, I’m sad that even needs spelling out, but that goes to show the depth of emotional blindness normalised in adult men. When someone is in distress, you don’t just remove the stressor, you have to create an environment where they can regain that lost sense of security and comfort. You do that by talking. By re-assuring. All these behaviours which we teach to women by default, but men are left on their own to develop. John Gray, in his book, seeks to level the typical male response here as valuable but misguided. To that I say, no shit it’s misguided! These men are seemingly unable to comprehend the most human dimension of their partners, in a way that I would question the very foundation their love is built on. “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood”, reads George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, though I believe the two are ultimately one and the same, to be loved is to be understood, to feel seen and accepted with your vulnerable self softly enveloped in another’s gaze.

What I think might help is this idea that giving your partner flowers has very little to do with the material giving of flowers, but the symbolism driving it. It’s not superfluous, as many men might think, but a societally understood gesture of love. It says that you hold her in your mind, that you spent the effort, time or money on them because you wanted to share the beauty of them with her. You picked them out, thinking about what she would like, and brought them back home. It’s not something you needed to do to live. It’s not the same as getting groceries on your way back home as a “gesture of love”. It’s precisely because it’s “surplus” that it becomes a playful act, which wrenches joy back from the jaws of life’s demands. The ideal is that one remains in-touch with both languages of life, the material and the emotional, perfectly balancing the two.

Society’s steering wheel should be in the hands of the artists who see beauty in the world and want to protect it. Everyday I’m painfully reminded to see wide-reaching decisions being made by powerful people, who even in a passing glance of an interview, come off as this sort of ideal military soldier who don’t care about the people, find no meaning in life, and most destructive of all, have an obsession about extracting wealth from society nearing psychosis. We are being led into the future by expert marketers and businessmen, rather than the kind-hearted, loving people who would swear to protect the mundane, but beautiful every-day.

Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things. - Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea