The role of the artist

Artists make change happen. Artists are humans who do generous work that might not work. Artists aren’t limited to paint or museums. You’re an artist as soon as you announce you are. As a leader, a coach, a contributor, a designer, a musician, an impresario … it’s art if you let it be. If you care enough.

Art isn’t just something that poorly compensated artists do inside a studio. Art isn’t just related to objects. As long as you’re reimagining the status quo—as long as you’re disturbing the peace, in James Baldwin’s memorable phrase—anything you do in your life can be art.

that “a work of art is something new in the world that changes the world to allow itself to exist.”

Art begins with receptivity. Every artist, in a way, is feminine, just as every artist is a mystic. And a political creature. Making art can be a subversive act, an act of resistance against the deadening lure of consumption, an act of unbridled peacemaking disguised as a poem or a song or an abstract rendering of an aspen leaf swirling in a stream

revolutions began in part with a “break in consciousness” brought about by thought leaders: artists, writers, and journalists. These men and women of letters “help[ed] to create that general awareness of dissatisfaction, that solidified public opinion, which . . . creates effective demand for revolutionary change.”47