Last week, the Director of the CDC announced that the stats on Omicron are “encouraging” because, among the vaccinated, it’s mostly killing disabled and chronically ill people. This week, politicians who’ve dedicated themselves to suppressing voting rights are now quoting Martin Luther King Jr. all over Twitter. On a good day, it seems like we’re living in an alternate reality. On a bad day, it feels like all meaning is lost. In addition, we’re fast approaching the third year of isolation and uncertainty, forced to navigate the emotional, spiritual, financial, and cognitive challenges that the pandemic brought along with it.

Historically, whenever things are bad—though I’m straining to remember a time when things have felt this bad—whenever I’ve felt helpless or hopeless, I’ve always turned to art and culture to help me find meaning. But what do we do when art and culture seem to be running, arm-in-arm, away from it?

Recently, when a reality star who’d been making $200,000/month selling her farts in mason jars had to abandon the endeavor due to the health problems she caused herself, she quickly regrouped by turning her fart jars into NFTs. She released an edition of 5,000. If they sell out, she stands to make a cool mil. I know it sounds like a funny headline—and it is—but it represents something far more ominous.

A reality star selling NFT farts is what happens when the attention economy and the speculative art market¹—two phenomena that have not been kind to artists—come together to destroy meaning. An NFT fart² purveyor is the perfect avatar for a culture that embraces style over substance, spectacle over skill, and fleeting amusement over lasting appreciation—all things that devalue art and demoralize the people who make it.³

So what do we do? If you’re me, your first response is to cry and eat a lot of instant mashed potatoes. Then, you regroup and you remember: if meaning is in short supply right now, we need only make more of it. That’s what we do, after all.

A few days ago, I was listening to an old interview of Terry Gross in which she was the interviewee. The interviewer asked if she and her team at Fresh Air have always been working toward equity by trying to feature guests from a wide range of backgrounds. “We don’t make the culture, we reflect the culture,” she replied. “When we started in 1987, women were much less a part of pop culture than they are now. They weren’t writing movies, they weren’t directing movies, they weren’t getting as exciting leading roles as they are now… And in terms of people of no-color: ditto. As time goes by, the doors open more and more and the guests that we have access to—the guests who are making the work—are more diverse.” It is the only time I’ve ever been furious with Terry Gross.⁴

Of course journalists, arts writers, commentators, and critics have a responsibility to reflect culture—just as artists reflect and respond to it—but to imagine that everything we do is not also contributing to culture is either heart-stoppingly naive or a willful dereliction of duty. And if we are always making culture by what we do, then we are also always capable of changing it. So I’m not going down without a fight.

Here are my promises to you:

I will always search for meaning in the world, no matter how bleak things seem. And for every minute I spend writing about a blockhead selling digital files of her own flatulence, I’ll spend hours writing about people like this young art collector who is using the same technology to uplift artists and shift the balance of power in the art world.

If you are working to create meaning and you feel like you are screaming into an indifferent void, you can always come here to be reminded that there are people who are listening. This is a community that cares about the devotion that goes into making things, that understands the process of loving something into being.

By reminding each other of what matters, we strengthen a muscle that supports us in everything we do. That which feeds us, buoys us, and bolsters us here is transferrable to other people and other challenges we face. Art ripples out into the world by helping us make meaning when all seems lost.