Calling Creative Catalysts

[Applause]

[Music]

[Music]

artists

have you ever been asked to work for

exposure

i have it is one of the most common

requests

across creative disciplines that artists

receive

it is the request to use our talent for

free

in service of others for the reward

just to be seen when in fact

it is we are who are exposing others

let me tell you the importance of

creativity

every day we are literally surrounded

by the work of artists and craftspeople

from the day we are born to the day we

die

this is how ubiquitous creativity is it

forms humanity’s

very identity our very existence

it is the book that you’ve been dying to

read

it is the movie that you watched last

night and you cried

it is the music that kept you dancing

until four in the morning because you

found

god on the dance floor that is

creativity

and take away all of this wonder

and creation and what do you have

you have what feels like

a prison the truth is

the capacity for human creativity and

invention

is one of the hallmarks as one of the

most valuable

qualities of the human species

to quote terence mckenna creativity

redeems the idea that man

is good and when you look at the world

right now with everything melting down

falling apart

coveted political upheaval

we have people protesting in the streets

for freedom and civil rights and against

racism

we have people fighting just to save the

planet and our species

and for clean air and water and for the

animals to even have a fighting chance

we need this kind of creative redemption

right now it is

an awful thing that so many of us are

going through right now

as a collective suffering

but i feel deep down that this is also

in a way a painful awakening

to something that needed to

come forward into the open for a very

long time

what i know for sure is that creative

transformation happens at the

growth edge of risk

and what i know from going to burning

man

for 20 years and completely remaking

myself as an artist in the process

is that human evolution happens when we

begin to shift our consciousness

towards what is possible

not our flaws and not

all of these mistakes and not what’s

wrong although that needs to be

acknowledged but we need

visionary culture to lead the way

forward

and to my mind the ultimate creative

dare

is to try to shift consciousness through

the conduit

of art

i like to think of what we’re going

through right now

with an analogy of the evolution of a

butterfly

you have this caterpillar and in order

to get this

to this winged glory of a butterfly it

has to build a tight little cocoon

around

itself and utterly liquefy

its entire being in order to restructure

itself to graduate

and fly into the light and become a

butterfly

this is who we are right now this is

where we are right now as human beings

we are inside that cocoon

we are in identity crisis we are in

quarantine we are in lockdown we are

society

restructuring ourselves hopefully from

the ground up

because we have realized that our ways

are unsustainable

and that we have to let go of who we

were

to become the society that we want to be

so the good news is that throughout

human history

creators have been on the forefront of

uplifting and shaping

human identity from the cave paintings

of lasko in france to the paintings of

titus kaphar in the united states

from the temples of ancient egypt to the

futuristic

architecture of zaha hadid from the

transcendent icarus

of the peruvian shamans to the

gut-wrenching uplifting songs

of beethoven’s ninth symphony and just

for good measure

from the elusivian mysteries of ancient

greece

to the transcendent creative experiment

of burning man

all of this is relevant and all of this

is needed now you are needed right now

this time is no different

so at burning man i built this 75 foot

wide

sculptural space called helios it was

inspired by

leonardo da vinci’s vitruvian man

drawing

as a gesture of self-empowerment

but the first thing i wanted to do with

the sculpture was to create

a ritual and i did that

by asking people to interact with the

art

by writing what they wanted to

illuminate within themselves

and share with the world at a central

altar

that everyone wrote wrote on

endless scrolls this

really personal deeply aspirational

secret

and they hid it inside the altar and

went

up the stairs and then stood and closed

the circuit with their bodies and

projected a light beam

out into space and if you encourage your

community

and five other people to do exactly the

same thing

at exactly the same time and all crossed

your light beams and held it for a

minute straight

then the light sequences would

materialize and the lights shone down

this centered mirrored taurus

bounced off a six-sided mirrored pyramid

and your light that you shot out into

the world

was returned to you tenfold

this is the kind of art

that we need right now to art that

empowers people

like the one who escaped the illusory

default world of plato’s allegory of the

cave

artists are called to expose the truth

and offer a vision of an evolved reality

call it the highest common denominator

instead of the lowest common denominator

that’s really what working for exposure

is

working to expose how we need to evolve

working with intention

working with the highest good

in our mind because that’s the only way

our humanity is going to heal

because when you change the heart

and you change the mind you change

consciousness

and when you change consciousness

you can change the world

let’s get to work

you