Solving The World's Problems Through Art - Part 1

Art can solve the world's problems.

Not help with. Not contribute to. Not play a role in.

Solve.

I believe this so completely that I have made it the strap line of my company.

I know how that sounds.

It sounds naive. It sounds like the kind of line someone writes on a poster and hangs in a coffee shop next to a print of a sunset. It sounds like the soft, hopeful, slightly embarrassing thing you say when you don't have a real answer.

I understand why you'd think that.

We have been trained, for at least three generations, to treat art as the thing that happens after the serious work is done.

Art is the budget that gets cut first.

Art is the subject the bright kids are quietly steered away from.

Art is the nice to have, the dessert, the optional module, the hobby you keep on the side while you get on with your real life.

The act of creating art is not seen as real work.

Real work is being a doctor, a lawyer, a banker. Activities that create financial status and a pathway towards keeping up with the Joneses.

So when someone walks into the room and says art can solve the world's problems, the trained response is to smile politely and change the subject.

But somewhere underneath that trained response, you already know it's true.

You've felt it.

You've felt it in the song that arrived at the exact moment you needed it and rearranged something inside you that no therapist, no book, no friend had been able to touch.

You've felt it in the film that made you cry for a stranger you'd never met and could not have met, because the stranger was an idea given a face.

You've felt it standing in front of a building, or a painting, or a piece of music, that was made by someone who has been dead for five hundred years, and feeling, across all of that time, seen.

You've felt it on a dancefloor at three in the morning, when ten thousand strangers became one body and you remembered, for the first time in months, that you were not alone.

That feeling is not decoration.

That feeling is the place where the human meets something larger than the human.

Every artist who has ever made anything that mattered has reported the same experience. That the work did not come from them. That they were the channel, not the source. That something moved through them.

Some call it the muse. Some call it inspiration, in its original Latin sense, inspirare, to breathe into. Some call it the universe. Some call it source. Some call it God.

The name does not matter.

What matters is that the testimony is the same across every culture, every century, every discipline.

Art is the bridge.

Art is where the seen meets the unseen, and brings back evidence the rest of us can hold.

And the case I am about to make is that we did not invent that bridge.

We inherited it.

To understand why I believe this, you have to come with me to the beginning.

Not the beginning of the music industry. Not the beginning of the modern world. The beginning of us.

Come back with me seventeen thousand years.

You are in the Vézère Valley, in what we now call southwestern France. The last ice age is still in the ground. The animals are larger than anything you have ever seen with your own eyes. The night is darker than any night you can remember, because there is no other light on the surface of the earth except the one in your hand.

You are holding a torch made of pine resin and animal fat.

You are crouching low, because the entrance to the cave is barely a mouth in the limestone.

You crawl.

You crawl for a long time.

And then the passage opens, and you stand up, and you lift the torch, and the wall comes alive.

There are bulls above you. Seventeen of them. Charging across a ceiling that someone has turned into a sky. There are horses, stags, bison, a single bear, a creature with the head of a man and the body of a stag. The pigments are red ochre and black manganese and yellow earth, mixed with spit and animal fat and applied with hollow bone and chewed twig and the bare human hand.

The figures are not crude. They are not the stick drawings a child makes.

They are foreshortened.

They are layered.

They are alive.

Someone, in the dark, by the light of a flame the size of a fist, has solved the problem of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface seventeen thousand years before Brunelleschi gets the credit for it in Florence.

And here is the thing you have to understand.

The aurochs on the wall is not a decoration.

It is a lesson.

It is your grandfather, teaching his grandson, across a generation he will not live to see, how to read the shoulder of a charging bull. It is the elders of the tribe teaching the young how the herd moves, where the herd waters, which animal in the herd is the one that will kill you if you do not see it coming.

The cave is a classroom.

The cave is a library.

The cave is the first university the human species ever built.

And it is built out of art.

There is no writing yet. There will not be writing for another twelve thousand years. There is no agriculture yet. There is no metalworking, no wheel, no city, no king, no law. The species has not yet figured out any of the things we now think of as civilization.

But it has figured out this.

It has figured out that you can take a piece of charcoal and a piece of stone and a flickering flame, and you can encode a generation of survival knowledge into a wall, and you can transmit that knowledge across centuries to people you will never meet.

That is not decoration.

That is the most important technology ever invented by a human being.

And it was not isolated.

The same impulse, the same images, the same hand, appears across the entire human world at roughly the same moment. Chauvet, also in France, thirty-six thousand years old. Altamira, in northern Spain, with its painted ceilings of charging bison. El Castillo, older still. Cosquer, now submerged beneath the Mediterranean, painted when the water was forty meters lower than it is today. The painted shelters of Australia. The rock art of the Sahara, made when the Sahara was green. The hand stencils of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, recently dated to over forty-five thousand years ago, the oldest figurative art currently known on the planet.

The pattern is not local.

The pattern is the species.

The moment we became us, the moment the cognitive switch flipped from hominid to human, we did the same thing on every continent we landed on.

We made art.

Not because we had time for it. We had less time than any human being alive today. We were cold, hungry, hunted, surrounded by predators larger than ourselves, and our average life expectancy was somewhere around thirty.

We made art because we had to.

Because we could not have survived without it.

Because the act of pressing pigment to stone, in the dark, by torchlight, was the act that allowed us to become the kind of creature who could pass on a survival to a grandchild we would never see.

Art was the technology that made the rest of the technologies possible.

And we have been running on that operating system ever since.

We just stopped noticing.

Now follow the pattern forward.

Lascaux is not an isolated miracle. It is the first page of a book that the human species has been writing, on every continent, in every century, ever since.

Every civilization tells you what it valued by what it left behind.

And what they left behind is never the politics. It is never the bureaucracy. It is never the tax records.

It is the art.

Egypt.

For three thousand years, ancient Egypt ruled the Nile and shaped the imagination of the entire Mediterranean world. Thirty dynasties. Hundreds of pharaohs. A civilization that outlasted the rise and fall of every other power around it.

Name one of them.

You probably know Tutankhamun, because we found his tomb intact. You might know Ramses. You might know Cleopatra, but only because Shakespeare wrote a play and Hollywood made a film.

What you actually remember is the Great Pyramid. The Sphinx. The bust of Nefertiti. The painted tombs of the Valley of the Kings. The death mask in gold and lapis.

Three thousand years of administration, vanished. The art still standing in the desert.

Greece.

The same story.

The Athenian assembly is gone. The Spartan constitution is gone. The exact procedures by which a Greek city-state voted on a tax, or declared a war, or banished a citizen, are footnotes in academic journals nobody reads.

But the Parthenon is still on the hill.

The Iliad is still on the shelf. The Odyssey is still in the school. Sophocles and Aeschylus and Euripides are still being performed, two and a half thousand years after they were written, in languages that did not exist when they wrote them. The Discobolus is still teaching us what the human body in motion is supposed to look like.

The politics built the scaffold. The art is the building.

Rome.

The Roman Empire was one of the great administrative machines in human history. Roads. Aqueducts. Legions. A legal code that still underwrites half the laws of modern Europe.

And yet ask yourself what comes to mind when you think of Rome.

The Pantheon. The Colosseum. Trajan's Column. The mosaics of Pompeii, frozen in mid-conversation under sixteen feet of ash. Virgil's Aeneid. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, written in a tent on a freezing campaign on the Danube, and read more widely today than it was the day he wrote it.

The Senate fell. The Pantheon is still standing.

Medieval Europe.

Now we hit the era we are taught to call the Dark Ages, as though nothing happened for a thousand years.

Look up.

Chartres. Notre-Dame. Salisbury. Cologne. Canterbury. The cathedral at Reims, where every French king for eight hundred years was crowned. Buildings that took four generations to construct, where the architect who designed the foundation knew, with absolute certainty, that he would not live to see the spire.

Hear it.

Gregorian chant. The polyphony of Pérotin and the Notre-Dame school. Hildegard of Bingen composing in a Rhineland abbey by candlelight in the twelfth century, writing music that nine hundred years later sells more copies in classical charts than most living composers.

Read it.

Dante's Divine Comedy. The Canterbury Tales. The Book of Kells.

The feudal contracts are dust. The cathedrals are still cutting the sky.

The Renaissance.

And then comes the moment that proves the thesis beyond argument.

For roughly two hundred years, beginning in a single city in central Italy, an experiment runs that human civilization has never repeated at the same intensity.

The Medici, who could have spent their banking fortune on private armies and territorial expansion, spend it on artists instead. They commission Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Ghirlandaio. They fund Marsilio Ficino to translate Plato. They bring Michelangelo into their household as a boy. They support Leonardo. They pay for the Sistine Chapel and the dome of the cathedral and the libraries and the academies.

By the time it is finished, Florence has a population of around seventy thousand people.

Today, over sixteen million people a year travel from every country on earth to walk through it.

They are not going to see the banking ledgers.

They are going to see the art.

And here is the part the history books underplay.

The Renaissance was not the high point of Western civilization because it had better politicians, or better generals, or better economists.

It was the high point because, for two hundred years, a culture decided that art was the most important thing it could spend its money on.

Beauty was treated as infrastructure.

The artist was treated as a national asset.

The act of making something that would last five hundred years was treated as more important than the act of winning next quarter's war.

And the entire modern world, the entire idea of what a free human being looks like, the entire scientific revolution that followed and gave us the laboratory and the steam engine and the laptop you are reading this on, traces back, through an unbroken line, to that two-hundred-year window in Florence when somebody decided to commission a painting.

Pause on that.

The science we live by, the medicine that keeps us alive, the engineering that built the cities we sleep in, the political philosophy that gave us the vote, the very idea that the individual human being matters as an individual, all of it grew out of a culture that put art at the center.

The scaffold was the Medici banking system.

The building was the Renaissance.

The Medici banking system is gone.

The Renaissance is the floor we are all still standing on.

And what made it possible, more than any single other factor, was a handful of men and women who refused to accept the modern lie that art is one thing and science is another, that beauty is one thing and seriousness is another, that the soul is one thing and the world is another.

They knew better.

They knew that the truly great mind treats all of it as one thing.

And that brings us to them.

History is littered with them.

Hildegard of Bingen.

Filippo Brunelleschi.

Leonardo da Vinci.

Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Albrecht Dürer.

William Blake.

Benjamin Franklin.

Thomas Jefferson.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Richard Wagner.

Men and women who, across nine hundred years, refused to accept the modern lie that art is one thing and the rest of life is another. They painted and they engineered. They wrote and they governed. They composed and they doctored. They built domes and they wrote constitutions. They saw visions and they founded sciences.

The modern world struggles to even classify them.

Was Leonardo a painter who happened to dissect bodies, or an anatomist who happened to paint? Was Jefferson a statesman who happened to write, or a writer who happened to found a country? Was Hildegard a mystic who happened to compose, or a composer who happened to see God?

The question is the wrong question.

The question assumes the categories were ever real.

They were not.

The categories are a recent invention, mostly nineteenth-century, designed to fit human beings into the assembly line of the industrial age. Before that, the greatest minds in human history treated all of it as one thing. The discipline did not have a name.

But it had practitioners.

Let me show you four of them.

Hildegard of Bingen. Born 1098.

The Rhineland. The high middle ages. A century when most of Europe is illiterate and the few who can read are men.

She is given to the Church at the age of eight.

She lives the next seventy years inside the walls of an abbey.

And from inside those walls, by candlelight, she produces a body of work that would be staggering for a team of researchers in a university today.

She writes three vast volumes of visionary theology, Scivias, Liber Vitae Meritorum, and the Liber Divinorum Operum, each one accompanied by illuminations she supervises personally.

She composes over seventy liturgical works, more than any other named composer of her century, and Ordo Virtutum, the earliest surviving morality play set to music.

She writes Physica and Causae et Curae. Two medical and natural-history texts so detailed that scholars now consider her the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.

She corresponds with popes, emperors, and abbots.

She preaches in public, almost unheard of for a woman in her century.

She founds two monasteries.

She is canonised and declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. Only the fourth woman in history to be so named.

And running through every page of every one of these works is a single idea. Viriditas. The greening power. The vital force she sees flowing through every leaf, every rock, every human body, every star.

She writes, in the Liber Divinorum Operum:

Read that line again.

It is theology. It is poetry. It is biology. It is mysticism. It is metaphysics.

It is all of those things, and Hildegard does not distinguish between them, because in her mind they are not different things.

Her music, nine hundred years later, sells more copies on classical charts than most living composers.

She did all of this from inside an abbey, by candlelight, while almost no one else in Europe could read.

She was one woman.

Filippo Brunelleschi. Born 1377.

Florence. The threshold of the Renaissance.

He trains as a goldsmith.

He competes for the commission to make the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery in 1401. He loses to Ghiberti. He goes to Rome in disgust and spends the next twenty years studying the ruins of the ancient world.

And while he is there, in front of those ruins, he solves a problem that no one in Western art has solved for a thousand years.

He invents linear perspective.

Around 1415, he stands in front of the Florence Baptistery and performs a demonstration. He has painted a panel showing the Baptistery, exact in every detail. He drills a small hole through the panel. He hands the panel to a viewer, who holds it at arm's length with the painted side facing the actual Baptistery, and holds a mirror up in front of it. The viewer looks through the hole, through the mirror, and sees the painted Baptistery align exactly with the real one.

It is the founding moment of geometric perspective in Western art.

It is also the founding moment of something else.

Because the mathematics that Brunelleschi has just demonstrated, the geometry of how three-dimensional space projects onto a two-dimensional surface, is the same mathematics that will give the West its cartography, its astronomy, its ballistics, and ultimately the optics that will produce the telescope.

Renaissance science is born from a problem in painting.

And then, in 1420, Brunelleschi takes on a problem no one in Europe has been able to solve for over a century.

The cathedral of Florence has been under construction since 1296. The walls are finished. The choir is finished. The transepts are finished. But the dome that is supposed to crown it, a dome wider than any built since ancient Rome, has been left as a gaping hole in the roof for more than a hundred years.

Nobody knows how to build it.

The traditional method requires wooden centring, an interior scaffolding to support the masonry until the mortar sets. But the dome is so wide that no forest in Europe contains trees tall enough or strong enough to make the scaffolding.

Brunelleschi proposes to build the dome without scaffolding.

He proposes a double-shell construction, an inner dome and an outer dome, linked by ribs. He proposes a herringbone bricklaying pattern that allows each ring of bricks to lock the previous ring in place as it is laid. He designs custom hoists, custom cranes, custom barges to bring the marble down the Arno. He insists on overseeing every detail himself, because the workmen do not believe what he is telling them is possible.

The dome is completed in 1436. Sixteen years.

It is the largest masonry dome ever built.

It is still the largest brick-and-mortar dome in the world, six hundred years later.

When the Florentine officials, before they awarded him the commission, asked him to prove his fitness, they reportedly challenged him to make an egg stand on end on a marble slab. None of the other architects could do it. Brunelleschi cracked the bottom of the egg and stood it up. The officials objected that anyone could have done that. Brunelleschi replied that anyone could also build his dome, once he had shown them how.

That is the polymath's signature.

He sees the solution before anyone else can.

And then he shows them how.

Leonardo da Vinci. Born 1452.

Vinci, a small town in Tuscany. Illegitimate. Apprenticed at fourteen to Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. Dies in France in 1519, according to legend in the arms of King Francis I.

He leaves perhaps fifteen completed paintings.

Fifteen.

Three of them, the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and Vitruvian Man, are among the most recognisable images ever produced by a human being.

And he leaves something else. Over seven thousand surviving pages of notebooks, written in his characteristic mirror script, covering anatomy, hydraulics, military engineering, botany, geology, aerodynamics, optics, geometry, and the mechanics of human motion.

He dissects bodies in candlelit mortuaries when the Church forbids it.

He draws the fetus in the womb five centuries before medical illustration catches up.

He maps the cardiovascular system, the muscles of the shoulder, the structure of the eye.

He designs a parachute, an ornithopter, an armoured vehicle, a self-propelled cart. Working prototypes built in the twentieth century from his sketches fly, roll, and float.

He studies the movement of water with such precision that modern fluid dynamicists return to his drawings for insight.

And the image at the center of his thought, the image he comes back to again and again, is the Vitruvian Man. A human figure inscribed in both a circle and a square, drawn according to the proportions described by the Roman architect Vitruvius. It is, literally, the fusion of art and mathematics in a single line. The human being as a geometric proof. The geometric proof as a human being.

He writes, in the Notebooks:

That sentence is the entire thesis of this essay.

It is the entire thesis of this man's life.

And he writes, elsewhere:

This is not the writing of a Renaissance painter on the side. This is the writing of the most integrated mind the West has ever produced.

He did not have a day job and a hobby.

He had one mind.

He pointed it at everything.

Michelangelo Buonarroti. Born 1475.

Florence. Twenty-three years after Leonardo. Their lives will overlap by forty-four years and they will dislike each other almost the whole time.

Where Leonardo is a thousand projects half-finished, Michelangelo is a handful of projects taken to absolute completion.

The Pietà, carved at twenty-three, in which a block of Carrara marble becomes the dead Christ lying across the lap of his mother with such tenderness that grown men still weep in front of it five hundred years later.

The David, carved between 1501 and 1504, seventeen feet of marble that had been quarried decades earlier, given up on by two previous sculptors, and left lying on the workshop floor for years before Michelangelo took it up and set the angel free.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling. Four years on his back on a wooden scaffold, painting four hundred figures across five thousand square feet of plaster, in a posture so contorted that he wrote a comic sonnet to a friend describing the deformation of his body.

The Last Judgment, twenty-five years later, on the wall behind the altar.

The dome of St Peter's Basilica, designed in his old age, completed after his death, the template for every domed public building since. The U.S. Capitol. St Paul's in London. Les Invalides in Paris. All of them are children of his dome.

And in his spare time, he writes roughly three hundred sonnets and madrigals of high literary quality.

And in his spare time, he serves as military architect of the city of Florence during the siege of 1529.

He is asked, late in his life, how he carved the David.

He answers:

That sentence is what the polymath sees.

The polymath does not impose form on raw matter. The polymath sees the form that is already there, in the stone, in the human body, in the dome, in the equation, in the wall of the cave, and releases it.

Hildegard saw it in the candlelit visions of the abbey.

Brunelleschi saw it in the geometry of a dome that nobody else could build.

Leonardo saw it in the connection between everything and everything.

Michelangelo saw it in the marble.

These four are the spine of the case.

But they are not alone.

Albrecht Dürer in the Northern Renaissance, who founded the modern print market, wrote the first published German treatises on mathematics and geometry, and invented the modern concept of the artist as autonomous creative subject.

William Blake, the engraver-poet-mystic who gave England its second national anthem and gave the Industrial Revolution its most enduring critical phrase, dark Satanic mills.

Benjamin Franklin, who used wit and a coonskin cap as instruments of statecraft, ran a print shop, discovered the nature of electricity, invented the lightning rod and bifocal lenses, and negotiated the alliance with France that won the American Revolution.

Thomas Jefferson, who founded a country with a single sentence about self-evident truths, designed Monticello, designed the most beautiful university campus in America, played violin daily, and assembled the collection of books that became the founding stock of the Library of Congress.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who wrote Faust, served as Privy Councillor to the Duke of Weimar, discovered the human intermaxillary bone, and founded the science of plant morphology that fed directly into Darwin.

Richard Wagner, who composed The Ring, designed his own theater to stage it, and gave us the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, from which modern cinema, the stadium concert, and the immersive installation all descend.

Ten people. Nine hundred years.

Not one of them was an artist who also did something else.

Each one of them was an integrated mind.

And the world we live in today, the science, the politics, the architecture, the literature, the music, the very idea of the free individual, was built by minds like theirs.

We have forgotten how to build minds like theirs.

But we have not forgotten how to recognize them.

When we see one, we still know.

Brunswick, Maine. 1851.

A woman sits at her kitchen table. She has six children. Her husband is a theology professor at the local college and the household runs on a salary that barely covers the rent. The youngest child, an eighteen-month-old boy, died of cholera the year before, and she has not entirely come back from it.

Her name is Harriet Beecher Stowe.

She has just read the text of the Fugitive Slave Act, signed into federal law the previous September. The law compels every citizen of the Northern states to assist in the capture and return of escaped enslaved people, under threat of fines and imprisonment. There is no longer such a thing as a free state. The entire country is now, by federal law, slave-catching territory.

Her sister-in-law sends her a letter.

It reads, in part:

Hattie reads the letter and stands up from the table.

According to her family, she says aloud, to no one in particular, I will write something. I will if I live.

She sits back down.

She begins to write the novel that becomes Uncle Tom's Cabin.

It runs first as a serial in The National Era, an abolitionist newspaper, beginning in June 1851. It is published as a two-volume book in March 1852. It sells ten thousand copies in its first week.

It sells three hundred thousand copies in its first year.

In a country where there is no television, no radio, no internet, no telephone, no national newspaper distribution, no advertising industry, and the population is twenty-three million. Three hundred thousand copies of a single novel, in twelve months.

It is translated into more than sixty languages.

In Maryland, an African-American minister is sentenced to ten years in prison for the offense of being found in possession of a copy.

In the slave-holding South, thirty separate novels are published over the next eight years to refute it.

The South understands, with absolute clarity, that this book is an existential threat to slavery.

Because the book does something no political argument has been able to do. It makes Northern readers, in their living rooms, feel what it is to be an enslaved human being. It makes them feel it through children. Through mothers. Through the breaking of families. Through scenes of Christian decency held by enslaved men against the casual cruelty of men who own them.

It bypasses the argument and goes straight to the heart.

There is a story, told by the Beecher family but never confirmed by the historical record, that ten years after the book's publication, in November 1862, Abraham Lincoln received Stowe at the White House and greeted her with the words So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.

The quotation is almost certainly apocryphal.

The historical point survives the apocryphal quotation.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is now regarded by scholars from David Reynolds onward as the most influential American book ever written, because it changed what a continent could no longer pretend it did not know.

One woman.

One kitchen table.

One pen.

She got there first.

Paris. April 1937.

Picasso is fifty-five years old. He has been commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, to open in July. He has been struggling. He has no subject. He has been making preliminary sketches for weeks of vague mythological themes, none of which feel right, none of which he believes in.

On the 26th of April, the Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, acting on behalf of Franco's nationalists, fly over the Basque town of Guernica on its market day. The town has no military significance. It is a civilian population center. The bombing lasts for several hours. The town is destroyed. Hundreds of civilians are killed, many of them women and children fleeing through the streets.

It is the first time in history that aerial bombing is used as a tool of deliberate terror against a civilian population.

Picasso reads the news in Ce Soir and L'Humanité, the Paris papers, over the next two days.

On the first of May, he begins the painting.

He works in his studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins on an enormous canvas, eleven feet tall and twenty-five feet wide. He paints in black, gray, and white. He paints with such intensity that Dora Maar photographs him at the easel every day for thirty-five days.

The result is Guernica.

A screaming horse. A fallen soldier still clutching a broken sword. A bull. A grieving mother holding the body of a dead child. A woman in flames. A single electric light bulb above the chaos, like an interrogator's lamp.

It is the most famous anti-war painting ever made.

It hangs at the Spanish pavilion in Paris for the duration of the Exposition. Hundreds of thousands of people see it.

Picasso then refuses to allow it to return to Spain while Franco is alive. It travels the world. New York. London. Stockholm. It hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan for over forty years. Generations of Americans grow up understanding what war is, through Guernica.

After Franco's death in 1975, it returns home to Madrid. A tapestry copy, woven in 1955 and purchased by Nelson Rockefeller, hangs outside the United Nations Security Council chamber in New York.

In February 2003, when Colin Powell prepares to deliver the speech that will provide the diplomatic cover for the invasion of Iraq, the tapestry is quietly covered with a blue curtain.

The diplomats know.

You cannot stand in front of Guernica and argue for a war.

One painter. One canvas. One bombed town.

He got there first.

Trảng Bàng, South Vietnam. June 8th, 1972.

A South Vietnamese pilot, flying a Skyraider, drops four canisters of napalm on a group of refugees fleeing along Route 1.

A twenty-one-year-old Vietnamese-American photographer for the Associated Press is on the road that day.

His name is Nick Út.

His camera catches a single frame. A nine-year-old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phúc, running down the road toward the camera. Her clothes have been burned off her body. Her arms are stretched out at her sides. Her mouth is open in a scream we cannot hear.

The photograph is transmitted to AP offices that night.

By the morning of the 9th, it is on the front page of newspapers across the United States and Europe.

It wins the Pulitzer Prize.

It is named World Press Photo of the Year.

And in the eighteen months that follow its publication, every major polling organization in the United States records the same trend. Public support for the Vietnam War, which had been declining slowly for years, collapses.

You cannot look at that photograph and continue to believe the war is moral.

That is the work the photograph did.

Nick Út did not write an op-ed. He did not deliver a speech. He did not file a lawsuit.

He pointed a camera and pressed a shutter.

One frame.

One nine-year-old girl.

He got there first.

Wembley Stadium. London. The 13th of July, 1985.

Seventy-two thousand people inside the stadium.

A billion and a half watching on television in a hundred and fifty countries.

The largest live audience in the history of broadcasting up to that date.

The man who has built this, almost single-handedly, over the previous nine months, is an Irish musician named Bob Geldof. He is the lead singer of a band called The Boomtown Rats. The Boomtown Rats are not the Beatles. They are not even close to the Beatles. Geldof is, in 1984, a moderately successful Irish rock singer whose career is on the downslope.

In October 1984, he sees a BBC report by Michael Buerk on the famine in Ethiopia. He sees children dying on camera.

He calls Midge Ure of Ultravox.

They write Do They Know It's Christmas? in a single afternoon.

They record it on the 25th of November with a one-day donation of studio time and the entire roster of British pop music. Sting, Bono, Boy George, George Michael, Phil Collins, Paul Young, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet. Every single one of them gives their time for nothing.

The single is released on the 7th of December.

It sells a million copies in its first week.

It is the fastest-selling single in British history up to that point.

It raises eight million pounds in the next year.

And then, in January 1985, the equivalent project happens in the United States. We Are the World. Quincy Jones, Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, the entire roster of American pop. It sells twenty million copies and raises sixty-three million dollars.

But Geldof is not finished.

In the spring of 1985, he proposes something that has never been done. A simultaneous transatlantic concert. London and Philadelphia. Live by satellite. The biggest concert in the history of the world.

On the 13th of July, it happens.

Wembley Stadium. JFK Stadium. Sixteen hours of music. Queen play one of the most famous twenty-minute sets in the history of rock and roll. David Bowie. U2. Phil Collins flies across the Atlantic on Concorde to play both shows in the same day. Madonna. Bob Dylan. Mick Jagger and Tina Turner. The Who. Led Zeppelin reunited for one night.

One point nine billion people watch.

It is forty percent of the population of the planet.

It raises a hundred and twenty-seven million dollars in famine relief. The total continues to climb for years afterwards.

But the money is not the point.

The point is what happens to Western foreign policy in the months and years that follow.

In the same year, the United States creates FEWS NET, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, the first global system designed to detect famine before it kills people. The Department for International Development is reorganized in the UK. Humanitarian aid moves from the fringe of foreign policy to the center of it.

And thirty-one years later, in 2016, when a major drought hits Ethiopia, FEWS NET detects it six months in advance, and food aid reaches the country before the famine peaks.

According to Alex de Waal of Tufts University, one of the world's leading authorities on famine response, no one died in that 2016 drought who would otherwise have died.

A pop concert in Wembley in July 1985 saved lives in Ethiopia in 2016.

Read that sentence again.

A pop concert.

Saved lives.

Thirty-one years later.

That is what art can do.

That is what one Irish singer, a co-writer from Ultravox, and a roomful of pop stars on a single day in November can do.

They did not pass a law.

They did not raise an army.

They did not negotiate a treaty.

They wrote a song.

They got there first.

The list goes on, and on, and on.

Charles Dickens, whose novel Oliver Twist helped end the workhouse system, and whose A Christmas Carol almost single-handedly reinvented Christmas as a season of charitable obligation in industrial Britain.

Mathew Brady, whose photographs of the dead at Antietam, exhibited in New York in October 1862, brought the corpses of the American Civil War into living rooms for the first time and changed what civilians could no longer pretend they did not know about what they had voted for.

Billie Holiday, whose recording of Strange Fruit in 1939 made lynching unignorable in Northern American cities at a moment when the press still routinely ignored it.

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Sam Cooke and Pete Seeger, whose songs were the marching infrastructure of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam movement, who turned diffuse generational unease into political identity.

Ang Lee, whose film Brokeback Mountain in 2005 made mainstream American cinema portray a queer love story as universal tragedy, and helped move public opinion on same-sex marriage from thirty-seven percent in support to sixty percent in ten years.

The directors of Philadelphia and Cathy Come Home and A Doll's House.

The street artists of the Berlin Wall.

The muralists of Bogside in Derry.

The novelists. The playwrights. The photographers. The filmmakers. The poets. The painters. The singers. The composers.

Every one of them got there first.

Every one of them felt the truth before the culture could name it.

Every one of them put the feeling into a form that the culture could carry.

And every time, the culture changed its mind.

Politics did not do this work.

Economics did not do this work.

Technology did not do this work.

Art did this work.

And of all the forms of art that have ever done this work, one form has done it more reliably, more deeply, and more directly than any other.

The form is music.

In Part Two of this essay, we walk into music properly. The neuroscience and the philosophy of why it goes in deeper than any other medium humans have ever invented. The modern collapse, and the cost we are now paying for it. The movement that is rising in its place. And your role in what comes next.

Part two arrives in your inbox later today.

Kind regards,

- The Baker

Solving The World's Problems Through Art | #thetimetodoisnow