Can Art Save the World?
“Artists can’t stop the flood—but we can build the ark.”
The world breaks. That’s not new. Floods come—literal, political, psychological, spiritual. Art doesn’t stop any of it. It doesn’t plug the dam or vote the right people in or pull bodies from rubble. It does something else. It preserves what matters. Art carries the signal through the noise. That’s why I paint. That’s why I believe art can save the world—not by preventing catastrophe, but by carrying meaning through it. I think about that often—and the longer I paint, the more I believe it.
What Survives
There are more than 160 versions of the flood myth across global cultures. In each one, there’s destruction—but also creative salvage. In the Genesis account, God doesn’t cancel the deluge. He tells Noah to build something with wood, pitch, compartments, dimensions—an ark. Not a miracle. A commissioned act of creation. This isn’t philosophy. It’s pattern. It’s archetype. It’s not just theology, but rather, a kind of early art instruction: something’s coming. You can’t stop it. But you can build a vessel.
I hear echoes of that every time I step into the studio. The blank canvas asking to be turned into something worth carrying.
Art as Reversal
Some of the most enduring symbols we have began as instruments of destruction. The cross, for example—Roman state execution. It’s estimated that 30,000 Jews were crucified in the first century CE. It was a device meant to humiliate, terrorize, and erase. But over time, through early Christian catacomb art and centuries of devotional painting, the cross was transformed—reborn, even—into a symbol of resurrection. A tree of life.
Art did that. Art turned terror into transcendence.
I think about that every time I paint one of my chromatic crosses. My goal isn’t to decorate trauma. It’s to reclaim it. To transform what W.J.T. Mitchell called the “ocular regime” of fear-based religious imagery into something defiantly alive. Colorful. Redemptive. That’s the alchemy Georges Didi-Huberman talks about—visual transmutation. And I believe in it. Because I’ve seen it. In the studio. In myself.
Why Conquerors Burn Museums
Here’s another pattern: when power wants to erase people, it starts by erasing their art. Ashurbanipal razed Susa in 647 BCE. The Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001. The Nazis looted over 600,000 works of art during WWII. The RAND Corporation documented that 78% of modern military invasions target cultural heritage.
Why?
Because art is more than decoration. It’s a civilization’s immunological memory—to borrow a term from biology. It encodes the stories, images, and rituals that hold a people together. You destroy that, you leave them disoriented. Easier to conquer. Easier to remake. And yet, art endures.
The Monuments Men recovered over five million works. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, stitched together by ordinary people in the ‘80s, helped a grieving nation count its dead when the government wouldn’t. These are not side notes. They’re central to the story of survival.
Studio as Ark
My studio practice, at this point in my life, feels like its own kind of ark-building. When I’m working on a Rubik’s Cube painting, for example, I’m not just playing with color or form. I’m engaging with a symbol of chaos and order—of disorderly order, as Edgar Morin would call it. The process of solving the cube isn’t linear. It’s a dance with error, pattern recognition, intuition. So is painting.
The brain sees it that way too. Neuroaesthetic studies show that solving visual puzzles—like cubes or compositional mazes—activates the anterior cingulate cortex, the region tied to conflict monitoring and adaptive decision-making. In other words, making art trains you to adapt. And when you work that way consistently, your brain doesn’t just get better at painting. It gets better at life.
Evidence in the Ashes
After every catastrophe—war, plague, collapse—the first human things we find aren’t spreadsheets or treaties. They’re drawings. Beads. Pots. A carved bone with hatch marks. We leave traces that say, I was here. This mattered. This hurt. This was beautiful anyway.
I think about Hiroshima. After the blast in 1945, there were survivors who made charcoal drawings—people who had seen hell and still felt compelled to render it. To witness. To leave a mark.
We’ve found children’s drawings in concentration camps. Painted pots beneath volcanic ash. Quilts sewn during plagues. Art persists not because it escapes destruction—but because it’s woven through it. Sometimes it’s buried. Sometimes it’s smuggled. But it waits. And when it’s found again, it speaks.
What I Know
They’ll say art is frivolous while Rome burns. But your job isn’t to put out the fire. Your job is to paint the flames—to catch what’s falling and fling it back in a shape someone can hold. You won’t know which piece will matter. Which image might shift something. So you work anyway. You make the mark as if it could matter. Because sometimes, it does.
And if nothing else—when the next wave comes, as it always does—maybe someone will find what we’ve made. A cross. A cube. A canvas. And they’ll remember not just that we suffered—but that we created anyway.
Final Thought
Can art save the world? The evidence suggests that while art cannot prevent the flood, it remains our most proven method for building arks.
– Monti Sharp
Sharp Art Studio
Selected References
Bahrani, Z. (2008). Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia. Zone Books.
Chatterjee, A., & Vartanian, O. (2014). Neuroaesthetics. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(7), 370–375.
Didi-Huberman, G. (2016). Bark. MIT Press.
Fagan, B. (2004). The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization. Basic Books.
Harrison, R. (2020). Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. UCL Press.
