Art in the times of Covid

Another faceless Covid-day, I did what any other sane person would not do: I turned my phone off, jumped on a ferry to the smaller of the islands in the Maltese Archipelago I’m currently quarantined at, and spent the weekend uncomfortably not-sleeping in the car. I just wanted to get even further away.

Article by Desiree Ragusa

I was at the edge of a cliff, eyes shifting between the beautiful rock formations and the lilac color of the sea post-sunset. The birds are especially vocal at dusk, have you noticed?

My mind was quiet for once. Then a question that has always nagged at me: Why humanity is so obsessed with art when it is essentially useless?

Paintings don’t provide shelter, nor music food. Poetry doesn’t provide safety. Dance doesn’t create vaccines. And yet, art has been featuring since the earliest recorded discoveries of civilization. From the Lascaux cave paintings in the South of France to today’s graffiti street art.

We turn to art. During times of celebration, or mourning or fear and distress, we turn to artists. We turn to making art. “This is what I’ve made” you write on your social media posts. “Do you like it?” 

When left to its own peaceful world out of social expectations and obligations, humanity turns heartbreakingly child-like. Vulnerable and open. We write poems about that one love in high-school we never really got over. We take up knitting in our twenties because it’s every millennial’s dream to live remotely and make their own clothes from scratch. Well, maybe not every millennial. We start painting, or take it up again. We open a piano lid that has been closed for a decade. We start online magazines, we write journals, take beautiful photographs. We become bakers and chefs!

We’re story-tellers.

All we have ever been trying to do is connect any beautiful way we know how. And this is how we do it: by writing, by singing, by making beautiful movies. By painting the thoughts inside of our hearts and composing the lament inside of our souls, hoping somebody will resonate with our work. Hoping to make someone feel a little less alone. Maybe hoping to feel a little less alone ourselves. 

Everything we do is a diary: from our choice of color clothes, to what we choose to cook, the music we listen to, and what we choose to look at. 

Everyone is forever caught in the act of constant creation. 

We’ve all of us always been artists, living our lives like an open wound, bleeding beauty into our surroundings, hoping to touch hearts.