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