In our new culture of "doing something," what is the artist's role? Who is an artist? What is the labor of art and creating? What is not the labor of art?

In her collection of thoughts, Intimations, tapped from a bored/overwhelmed/zealous mind in lockdown, Zadie Smith (born October 25, 1975) explores and demonstrates the small cultural fissures that slowly remake society in a new image.

Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area—that nobody asked you to carve - and you do 'something'. But perhaps the difference between the kind of something that I'm used to, and this new culture of doing something, is the moral anxiety that surrounds it. The something that artists have always done is more usually cordoned off from the rest of society, and by mutual agreement this space is considered a sort of charming but basically useless playpen, in which adults behave like children - making up stories and drawing pictures and so on - though at least they provide some form of pleasure to serious people, doing actual jobs.

I've always explained my current work running The Examined Life ("putting nice things onto the internet," as my friend calls it) in terms of the actual job I used to have as if both to validate and defend against public fear that I might be sailing forward on others' dime. But it's more than that, it's that I don't respect this space. This creative space and me in it.

Smith's word selection of "useless playpen."   I've written about the nature of play as a means to create, or read more from Alan Lightman on the true nature of pauses and breaks from our more serious life. Lightman would know, he sits atop vast pyramids of influence. suggests she does not respect the space wholly either. And yet, it is a place to game, think, and fumble our brain into the matter, cultivating the artists' temperament, as creative writer Dorothea Brande called it. I prefer Annie Dillard's image of contained consciousness.

Perhaps "playpen" is appropriate after all.

"Intoxicating Euphoria" hand-cut paper collage by artist Charlie Elms. Under his moniker 10 Yrs time, Elms produces resituated images of humans, nature, memory, power, and vulnerability. Available as a print.

Regardless, it is immaterial. The artist's world and work have changed in the past two years. "Serious work" or "play" are no longer our diametric pillars of life.

Smith adjusts our language:

An attempt to connect the artist's labour with the work of truly labouring people is frequently made but always strikes me as tenuous, with the fundamental dividing line being this question of the clock. Labour is work done by the clock (and paid by it, too). Art takes time and divides it up as art sees fit. It is something to do. But the crisis has transformed this familiar division between the time of art and the time of work. Now there are essential workers - who do not need to seek out something to do; whose task is vital and unrelenting - and there are the rest of us, all with a certain amount of time on our hands.

While no one would argue art's contribution to society, what Smith brings to light is the terms we use to describe our roles and the forced morality of those distinctions. It might no longer be "serious work" or "play," but "essential" and "non-essential" work. We imagine being an artist is only allowed if it is done in addition to time spent doing essential work.

I make no bones that what I do is essential; I am not even an artist per se, although I amplify artists. But if it is not crucial, why do it? Why does anyone do it? This configuration of essential and non-essential was created to support and highlight those individuals who are genuinely straining their daily lives to save others.

But it is accompanied by a moral anxiety, as Smith noted for those of us who are optional work-wise.

Paint splotches and tests by artist Mel Barrett. “Will you blend the paint so one hue transitions seamlessly into another, or will you make definable marks? If so, will your brushstrokes be delicate or strong? Thin or fat? Will you plan out every detail or leave some marks to chance and incorporate the interplay between brush, human, and paint always brings?” Barrett paints in the shadow of a day filled with others’ needs.

In Intimations, Smith demonstrates what it is like for an artist to go through lockdown, or rather, to live in a society that values the creation of art as an Instagramable hobby but not so much as a profession.

In the absence of feeling "essential" and yet equally unable to forgo the playpen, Smith does the logical thing: routinize the day in an attempt to participate in this culture of "doing something."

Back in the playpen, I carved out meaning by creating artificial deprivations within time; the kind usually provided for people by the real limitations of their real jobs. Things like 'a firm place to be at 9.00 every morning' or 'a boss who tells what to do'. In the absence of these fixed elements, I'd make up hard things to do, or things to abstain from. Artificial limits and so on. Running is what I know. Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat.

Didn't we all do this? Order things, cultivate systems, and impress control within and without the space lockdown afforded us?

How does that lifestyle appear against Thoreau's conviction that we should all walk about with a hint of the spirit of undying adventure (or indeed his entire philosophy of living deliberately) or Mary Ruefle's rambling ode to cultivating imagination?

Illustration by Maira Kalman from The Principles of Uncertainty.

I dove into Susan Sontag's On Photography recently, one of the most important studies on photography as an art form, a communication tool, and an appropriation of space. On Photography is important not because I say it's important, it is important because when you read it, it feels instantly familiar, real, insightful, and names that very thing that you also think about photography and our habit of documentation but perhaps did not know how to articulate. (I certainly lacked the words).

A reader of mine wrote me a note essentially saying this does not matter.

He was caustic and thus ignored. But is he right? Does it matter? Philosophy, art, poetry? Photography certainly does. More than ever. Why not a photography essay?

"It's August Again" collage by Mark Hearld. Photograph courtesy of Raucous Invention: The Joy of Making.

Whatever the shortcomings of art - the oddity of usage, the privileged few who "get it," the inability to do practical things with it (can't blow your nose, can't eat it for dinner) - it has a place in society and that place, although changing, must exist alongside "essential work."

If only because without art and artists and philosophers   In the introduction of Intimations, Smith writes:  
"Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius for the first time in my life.…"  
Should you too be so inclined, read more from Aurelius'  reflections on the meaning of living and the interconnection of all things. and poets, we will have a lot of unexpressed "psychological quirks," as Smith put it, which tend to sour after a while if contained.

I write because... well, the best I can say for it is it's a psychological quirk of mine developed in response to whatever personal failings I have. But it can't ever meaningfully fill the time. There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love. The difficulties and complications of love - as they exist on the other side of this wall, away from my laptop - is the task that is before me, although task is a poor word for it, for unlike writing, its terms cannot be scheduled, pre-planned or determined by me. Love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through-that must be why it frightens so many of us and why we so often approach it indirectly.

May the hearts and minds of artists never sour, nor our hearts and minds in partaking them. Read Virginia Woolf's timeless opinion on the conditions necessary for creating art  (because I said so), as well as novelist John Steinbeck's madcap diaries and letters that manifest a fierce awareness of personal failings and a man at odds with himself. Then round off with Jason Reynold's zest and love for the aching, howling, spirit thing that is our creative potential.