A New Renaissance Wouldn’t Just be Nice - The Future of Humanity Depends on it

The old saying that history does not repeat, but rhymes, is a devastating truth. One must only look through history in 100-year blocks to see the steady pendulum of crisis after crisis; the World Wars of the 20th century, the Civil Wars of the 19th century, the Revolutions of the 18th, and before that, the Glorious Revolution, the Armada Crisis, the War of the Roses, the Fall of Rome. Each crisis erupts from years of bubbling tension, a dash of corruption here, a phony leader there, obliterating the present reality with gunfire and mushroom clouds. Always there is a new world that stumbles out from the ashes and rebuilds itself with doctrines of so-called peace.

Humanity is a species cursed with amnesia, doomed to repeat its mistakes as soon as the witnesses of the previous crisis begin to die. And yet somehow, among the horror of it all, there remains art. Just as we can trace crises through 100-year blocks, so too can we see the evolution of art movements witnessing and responding to the beauty and devastation of their time. For example, the Abstract Expressionists saw Action Painting as the only logical consequence to an age as absurd as the atomic one. Though viewed as quintessentially “American-type painting,” the Abstract Expressionists imbued their work with the hallmarks of the enemy. Action painting was born from Eastern teachings of Zen and calligraphic mark making, and was in communication Gutai, the Japanese Art Association which sought to go beyond abstraction to pursue pure creativity. The consequence was a movement of art that, although co-opted by the United States government as a symbol of Capitalist freedom, was, in its true essence, a pure human reaction to the absurdity of war. This is why in the context of its time, Abstract Expressionist remains to me one of the most extraordinary moments in art history.

Film still from Bruce Connor’s Crossroads, 1976 shown at TATE Modern, London. The film was created from spliced footage from declassified footage from the US National Archives, played alongside a haunting soundtrack.

Given our current time of crisis, I wonder how we will be remembered, if there are people to remember us at all. Abstract Expressionism obliterated the conventions of art with atomic-like destruction, wiping the slate clean for an age of post-modernism that has devolved into a self-referential soup of irony, conceptualism and pastiche. But now that almost 100 years have passed, and we are faced with new wars and new existential threats beyond the fears of Shelley, the question is: Do we let art continue down the road of endless self-referential deconstruction until nothing is left but the void? Or are we due for another Renaissance?

My belief is that a new Renaissance is not only desirable, but it is imperative to the future of humanity. As nations continue to destroy one another, using their people as pawns and wars as money-farms, and as the cost-of-living drives up beyond compare and dopamine addiction leaves the masses in glazed over lumps of phone-scrolling, we need more than conceptual art, abstraction and digital media to enliven our souls. These are art forms that made sense for a grief-stricken world before the emergence of artificial intelligence, but our reality has changed. The postmodernist logic that spiralled into a singularity of nihilism mirrors the unchecked technological advancement that led to the creation of artificial intelligence. The consequence is a human race without meaning, and the creation of a God. It does not bode well for the future of humankind, especially when we are already so riddled with the same human frailties that caused crisis upon crisis for centuries.

If there is a solution, I believe it lies in holding on to our humanity, not only in our capacity to love or moralise, but in our potential to create beauty that mirrors the world around us. These are the humanist ideals of the Renaissance: beauty, learning, order, and the dignity and worth of the individual.

The Florentines knew this, though they did not come to these values without facing devastation before; the Black Death, the crisis of the church, the Fall of Constantinople and technological and political upheaval. But today’s existential threats are even greater; ecological collapse, technological nihilism, spiritual and cultural emptiness and political and economical instability. If the last Renaissance gave us a vision of human potential in a time when the world seemed to be ending, today we need a rebirth of meaning in a time when we face extinction, not just physical but spiritually, morally and intellectually. We need art, beauty, philosophy and ethics not just as luxuries, but as lifelines.

If we survive the next hundred years, I hope that the art that endures and thrives will be that of beauty and human skill. People will long for sensory experience: feeling the sun, genuine laughter, the satisfaction of writing a poem without the aid of technology. I think they will enter galleries and be captivated by painting because they will know it was crafted by a human hand. There will be no confusion over whether a painting is handmade as there is over the authenticity of a video or digital image. We will be in awe over paint made from ground pigment in walnut oil, applied in layers like the Old Masters, rendering a face as human as the viewer’s, with all the grit, suffering, and imperfection of the flesh and blood animal that made it. As we live more of our lives online, enmeshed with AI, consuming media through six-inch illuminated screens, I believe the fleshy light and colour of paint has the power to snap us out of our hypnosis and back into our bodies. It is up to us to value it, platform it, and let it be made while we still have our souls.

We must not forget what makes us human, in all its horror and beauty. The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, Paul Delaroche, 1833, National Gallery, London