The Defiance of Art: And why creating is the most human thing we have

Art has never been neutral.

From the first handprints on cave walls to the graffiti sprayed on city bridges, it has carried a message: I was here. I saw. I felt. I dared to mark the world with my vision. That simple act, the act of making a mark, is itself a defiance of silence.

This is why art has always made people nervous. Not the artists, but the ones in power. The Nazis mocked modern paintings as “degenerate” before confiscating them. The Soviets outlawed anything that didn’t fit their propaganda. Entire traditions have been erased simply because they didn’t serve the story the ruling regime wanted to tell. Why go to such lengths?

Because a painting, sculpture, or poem can do what those regimes cannot: it doesn't command you. It moves you. You don’t just understand it. You feel it.

But here’s the twist: that struggle isn’t only confined to the past. The threats may look different now, but the stakes are the same.

Today, art isn’t usually being burned in the streets. It’s being priced out of reach. Vaulted. Turned into an investment class. We treat it like gold bars, like something to hoard rather than something to encounter.

Think of it this way: what if every book you loved suddenly cost a million dollars? What would that do to our culture? To curiosity? To imagination itself? That’s the road we’re on when paintings become more valuable as stock than as story.

And that’s tragic, because art was never meant to be a hostage of wealth. It’s supposed to confront you, comfort you, confuse you, even anger you. It thrives where anyone can stumble upon it; a mural on the side of a building, a print in a café, a child’s drawing taped to a refrigerator.

That last one might feel small, even silly. But it’s not. A crayon drawing proudly slapped on the fridge is the same impulse as those handprints on the cave wall: I am here. I imagined. I dared.

In The Portrait of Eloise Leclair, I explored art as both individuality and defiance. One of its central characters insists that art is not a commodity, but a stronghold of individuality. To him, possessing a painting wasn’t about ownership at all, but stewardship—safeguarding and nurturing it. And when the time was right, letting it go so others could experience and learn from it.

That conviction guided the novel: that brushstrokes could carry stories, that clay and bronze could preserve memory, that to protect art was to protect the legacy and voices of those who came before and those still to come.

Because here’s the truth: art doesn’t need permission. It doesn’t need a curator’s approval or a collector’s vault to matter. It doesn’t even need to last. A mural might be painted over tomorrow, but today it spoke. A poem scribbled in the margin of a notebook might never be published, but to the one who read it, it carried rebellion.

So the shift is simple, but profound: stop asking only whether art is “beautiful,” and start asking what it’s doing. Because beauty alone doesn’t explain why art endures. What gives it power is the tension it carries, the way it resists forgetting, the truths it smuggles forward, the visions it preserves when everything else is trying to erase them.

A painting is more than pigment; it’s survival made visible. A mural on a wall isn’t just paint; it’s a neighborhood refusing to be invisible. A work in a museum isn’t just brushstrokes; it’s a message that survived long enough to reach you, often against the odds. Even the child’s crayon drawing is proof that imagination refuses to go silent.

To ask what art is doing is to recognize why it matters and why it keeps speaking long after its makers are gone.

Because art isn’t just decoration. It’s protest. It’s memory. It’s rebellion. And if all you’ve ever thought of art is stuffy museums and rich collectors, I hope you walk away with this: art isn’t the luxury of the few. It’s the inheritance of us all.

So pause. Look. Let yourself be unsettled. That pause, that jolt, that glimmer of recognition—that’s art doing its oldest job: reminding you that you are still free to feel, free to imagine, free to be human.

Art is a living conversation across time. Add your own marks, your own visions, however small or fleeting. Because rebellion isn’t always loud or violent. It can be as simple as refusing to let imagination die. It’s in every moment we choose to notice, to create, to remember.

And maybe that’s the call we need most right now: to let art wake us up. Not because rebellion sounds glamorous, but because forgetting is easy. It’s easy to be lulled into routine, to accept silence, to stop questioning. Art pushes back against that drift. It keeps us awake to memory, to possibility… to each other.

Art dares us to say: I am here too… And I will not be erased.

The banner image features Fearless Girl, a bronze sculpture by Kristen Visbal, originally installed in 2017 in New York's Financial District.

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