The Art of Grit

(10 minutes)
There’s a peculiar magic that happens when an artist picks up their brush, chisel, or pen—something far more profound than the creation of mere entertainment. In those moments of creative fervor, they become society’s dreamers, as Meret Oppenheim so eloquently observed. They reach into the collective unconscious and pull forth visions we didn’t even know we needed to see.
Consider this: while the rest of us are busy navigating the practical demands of daily life—paying bills, meeting deadlines, answering emails—artists are quietly performing one of humanity’s most essential functions. They’re asking the questions we’re too distracted to ask, seeing the patterns we’re too close to notice, and imagining the futures we’re too cautious to envision.

The Artist as Society’s Early Warning System
Artists have always been humanity’s canaries in the coal mine, sensitive to shifts in the cultural atmosphere long before the rest of us catch wind of change. Picasso’s fragmented faces preceded our understanding of psychological complexity. Orwell’s dystopian visions warned us of surveillance states decades before we carried tracking devices in our pockets. Frida Kahlo painted pain and resilience in ways that anticipated our modern conversations about trauma and healing.
This isn’t mere coincidence. Artists possess a unique form of intelligence—one that operates through intuition, metaphor, and synthesis rather than pure logic. They process information differently, combining disparate elements in ways that reveal hidden connections. While a scientist might study the individual components of a phenomenon, an artist grasps its emotional weight, its cultural significance, its place in the grand narrative of human experience.

Beyond the False Dichotomy
We’ve grown accustomed to thinking of art and science as opposing forces, as if choosing one means abandoning the other. This is perhaps one of our culture’s most limiting myths. In reality, the greatest leaps forward have often occurred at the intersection of artistic vision and scientific inquiry.
Leonardo da Vinci didn’t see his anatomical studies as separate from his paintings—they were part of the same quest to understand the beautiful complexity of existence. Marie Curie approached her research with the same passionate curiosity that drives a poet to find the perfect word. Today’s most innovative architects blend engineering precision with aesthetic vision, creating spaces that don’t just function but inspire.
The artist’s contribution to this partnership isn’t merely decorative. They bring something science alone cannot provide: the ability to make abstract concepts emotionally resonant, to transform data into meaning, to help us feel the significance of what we’ve learned. When a climate scientist presents graphs showing rising global temperatures, it’s the artist who helps us understand what it means to lose a glacier, to witness a species’ final song, to imagine our grandchildren’s world.

The Courage to See Differently
Perhaps what makes artists most valuable to society is their willingness to be vulnerable in public—to risk ridicule, misunderstanding, and failure in service of a vision. This courage creates permission for the rest of us to see beyond conventional boundaries.
Every artistic breakthrough involves a kind of rebellion against accepted ways of seeing. The Impressionists were initially mocked for their loose brushstrokes and unconventional subjects. Jazz musicians faced criticism for abandoning traditional harmonies. Contemporary artists continue to challenge our assumptions about what art can be, what stories deserve telling, what beauty looks like.
This rebellious spirit serves a crucial social function. In a world that often rewards conformity and efficiency, artists remind us that there are other ways to think, feel, and be. They show us that our current reality isn’t the only possible reality. In doing so, they keep alive the human capacity for transformation.

The Practical Magic of Aesthetic Experience
But perhaps we’re overthinking this. Maybe the artist’s greatest gift to society is simpler and more immediate: the expansion of our capacity for wonder. In a world that can feel increasingly mechanical and predictable, artists create moments of genuine surprise.
When you encounter a piece of art that stops you in your tracks—whether it’s a haunting melody, a perfectly captured moment in a photograph, or a poem that articulates something you’ve felt but never named—something shifts inside you. Your perspective widens slightly. Your emotional vocabulary grows. You become, in some small but meaningful way, more fully human.
This isn’t frivolous. These moments of aesthetic experience accumulate over a lifetime, creating a richer inner landscape, a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be alive. They make us more empathetic, more curious, more capable of finding meaning in uncertainty.

Dreaming Forward Together
Artists don’t just reflect society; they actively shape it. Every novel that expands our understanding of human nature, every song that gives voice to unspoken feelings, every dance that celebrates the body’s capacity for expression contributes to our collective evolution.
They help us process trauma and celebrate joy. They preserve cultural memory while imagining new possibilities. They remind us that efficiency isn’t everything, that beauty matters, that the human experience encompasses far more than what can be measured or quantified.
In our age of artificial intelligence and algorithmic thinking, this artistic perspective becomes even more crucial. Machines can process data and identify patterns, but they cannot dream. They cannot imagine what doesn’t yet exist. They cannot feel the weight of metaphor or understand the significance of silence.

The Ongoing Conversation
As we face unprecedented global challenges—climate change, social inequality, technological disruption—we need all forms of intelligence working together. We need the scientist’s precision and the artist’s vision, the engineer’s pragmatism and the poet’s insight.
The artist’s role in this collaboration isn’t secondary or supplementary. It’s essential. They help us understand not just what we’re capable of, but who we want to become. They dream for us when we’re too tired to dream for ourselves, see possibilities when we’re stuck in limitations, and remind us that being human is, itself, a creative act.
So the next time you encounter a piece of art that puzzles or challenges you, consider sitting with that discomfort a little longer. The artist may be showing you something you need to see, even if you’re not ready to understand it yet. They may be doing what they’ve always done: dreaming society forward, one vision at a time.
After all, someone has to imagine the world we’re becoming. Someone has to help us see beyond the horizons of our current understanding. Someone has to keep alive the possibility that tomorrow might be more beautiful, more just, more fully human than today.
Thank goodness for the dreamers.