Solving The World's Problems Through Art - Part 2

In Part One, we walked from the cave at Lascaux through Egypt, Greece, Rome, the medieval cathedrals, and the Renaissance. We met four polymaths who refused to separate art from the serious business of being alive. We saw four artists, across four centuries and four mediums, whose work changed the law, the war, and the world.

We ended on a single sentence.

The form is music.

This is where we walk into it properly.

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The Western Front. Christmas Eve. 1914.

Five months into a war that everyone had been told would be over by Christmas. The men in the trenches have been killing each other since August. The ground between the German and British lines is frozen mud, churned up by shellfire, dotted with the bodies of men who fell trying to cross it and could not be retrieved.

The temperature on the night of the 24th drops below freezing.

The men huddle in waterlogged dugouts. They have not had a proper meal in weeks. They have lice. They have trench foot. Many of them are eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old.

And then, in the early hours of the evening, something happens.

A British soldier in a forward trench reports hearing singing from the German line opposite.

It is Stille Nacht. Silent Night.

The soldier listens for a moment.

He recognizes the tune.

He begins to sing it back, in English.

Silent night. Holy night.

Other British voices join him along the line.

The Germans hear it. They sing the next verse.

The British answer.

For the rest of the night, up and down sections of the Western Front, men who have been killing each other for five months sing Christmas carols to each other across the frozen mud.

By the morning of the 25th, in places where the singing has gone on longest, soldiers begin to climb out of the trenches. Unarmed. Walking slowly into no man's land.

They exchange cigarettes. They show each other photographs of their wives and children. They bury the dead they have not been able to reach for weeks. They play football. There are documented matches with scores recorded in letters home.

The British and German high commands, when they hear of it, are horrified. They forbid any repetition the following Christmas. They threaten court-martial. They rotate units along the front to make sure no soldier becomes too familiar with the men opposite.

The Christmas truce of 1914 never happens again.

But it happened.

For one night, in one war, men stopped killing each other because they were singing the same song.

No treaty did that.

No general did that.

No speech did that.

A song did that.

Now ask yourself.

How.

The answer is something we have only recently been able to measure in laboratories, but which every human being has always known in their body.

Music bypasses the part of the brain that argues.

When you read a sentence, your brain has to decode the language, hold the meaning in working memory, compare it against your existing beliefs, and decide whether to accept or reject it. This takes time. It takes effort. It gives you a chance to defend yourself.

Music does none of those things.

Music arrives directly.

The auditory cortex processes it. The limbic system, the deep, ancient, pre-verbal emotional core of the brain, responds before the prefrontal cortex even knows what is happening. By the time the rational mind catches up, the song is already inside you. You have already felt it.

Neuroscientists who study music have a name for what happens when groups of people listen to or perform music together. They call it entrainment. Heart rates synchronise. Breathing patterns synchronise. Brain wave activity synchronises. The autonomic nervous systems of strangers, sitting in the same room or standing in the same field, begin to move in time with each other within minutes of a shared song beginning.

You can measure it.

You can put electrodes on a hundred strangers in a concert hall and watch their bodies become one body.

This is not metaphor. This is physiology.

The philosopher Iain McGilchrist, in his work on the divided brain, makes the point bluntly. Music is the most distinctively right-hemispheric of all art forms. It is whole. It is temporal. It is relational. It is embodied. It is metaphorical. And it is fundamentally resistant to the left brain's attempt to reduce it to parts. A song cannot be paraphrased. A song can only be experienced.

This is why music has always been the medium of choice when a culture needs to bypass the left brain's defenses and address the listener directly.

Roger Scruton said it more elegantly than anyone else.

That is what the Christmas truce was.

Two armies. Frozen mud. Ordinary physical sounds. And from somewhere just beyond the visible world, music opened a door that politics had spent five months trying to slam shut.

And it has done this in every century of recorded history.

Sacred chant. The Gregorian and Byzantine traditions. The way in which illiterate medieval peasants, who could not read the Latin Mass, learned the entire theology of Christianity through its melodies. The chant was the curriculum. The music carried what the words could not transmit alone.

National anthems. La Marseillaise, written in a single night in April 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, marched out of Strasbourg with the French Army of the Rhine, became the anthem of the Revolution, and is now the song France sings every time the nation needs to remember what it is. God Save the King. The Star-Spangled Banner. Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, sung in the streets of Soweto when the songs were banned and singing them could put you in prison.

Civil rights. We Shall Overcome, the song Pete Seeger taught to Joan Baez at the Highlander Center in 1957 with Rosa Parks in the room, the song every march sang from Selma to Birmingham to Washington. Strange Fruit, the song Billie Holiday recorded in 1939 that made Northern white America see what the press refused to print. A Change Is Gonna Come, written by Sam Cooke after hearing Blowin' in the Wind and wondering why a Black man had not written it first.

Vietnam. The entire counter-cultural movement was, structurally, a music movement. Dylan. Joan Baez. Country Joe and the Fish at Woodstock. Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. Edwin Starr's War. John Lennon's Imagine and Give Peace a Chance. The songs were not soundtracks. The songs were the organizing infrastructure.

Anti-apartheid. Free Nelson Mandela by Special AKA. Biko by Peter Gabriel. Sun City by Artists United Against Apartheid. The Mandela seventieth birthday tribute at Wembley in 1988, broadcast to over a billion people across sixty-seven countries. By the time Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison in February 1990, the world had been singing him out for years.

East Berlin. July 1988. Bruce Springsteen plays an open-air concert in East Germany. Three hundred thousand people show up. He gives a short speech in German about hoping that one day all the barriers would be torn down. Sixteen months later, the Berlin Wall falls. Springsteen's biographer Erik Kirschbaum has written an entire book arguing, with evidence, that the concert measurably accelerated East German pressure for opening.

The fall of the Wall itself, on Christmas Day 1989. Leonard Bernstein conducts Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Berlin, with an orchestra assembled from East Germany, West Germany, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. He changes the lyric of the Ode to Joy, just for that performance, from Freude, joy, to Freiheit, freedom.

That night, the song that Beethoven wrote in 1824 became the song that buried the Cold War.

Every time it has mattered, music has been there.

Not on the side. At the center.

And here is the thing the music industry, in its current shrunken state, has almost completely forgotten.

Music is not a single art form.

Music is the convergence point.

When an artist sets out to make music at scale, they do not just need songwriters and producers. They need photographers to capture the image. They need filmmakers to make the videos and the documentaries and the live captures. They need fashion designers to build the look. They need illustrators and graphic designers to create the artwork. They need lighting designers to shape the stage. They need set designers and stage designers to give the show its world. They need dancers and choreographers to embody the songs. They need directors to translate the music into film. They need writers to give the project its language, its essays, its press, its mythology.

Every other art form converges around music.

A great artist becomes a creative gravitational field. Around the songs, an entire ecosystem of makers gathers. Every album cover is a photograph or a painting. Every music video is a short film. Every tour is a piece of theater. Every stage is a piece of architecture. Every wardrobe choice is a piece of fashion design. Every tour book is a piece of literature.

Music is the form that pulls every other form home.

But it is wider than that.

Because the moment an artist starts to operate at scale, the ecosystem widens beyond the traditional definition of art into the rest of human creativity.

The audio engineer who designs the speaker that carries the song into a stadium is an artist.

The architect who designs the venue is an artist.

The lighting technician who programs the rig is an artist.

The tour director who builds the logistics of moving fifty people and forty tons of equipment from city to city is an artist.

The software engineer who builds the platform on which the song is heard by a hundred million people is an artist.

The entrepreneur who funds the entire enterprise so that the song can reach the body of a stranger on the other side of the world is an artist.

Every one of them is contributing something to the making of a moment that, when it lands in the ears of a listener, synchronises that listener's heartbeat with the heartbeats of millions of other listeners they will never meet.

This is what music is.

It is not entertainment.

It is not content.

It is the most powerful instrument of human connection ever discovered, and it is the form around which every other form of human creativity organizes itself.

Which means the artist who pursues music at the highest level is doing something extraordinary.

They are not just making songs.

They are building the convergence point.

They are gathering, around their own creative gravity, an entire ecosystem of makers who together produce a moment of mass human synchronisation.

This is the work.

This is what is actually happening when a song lands.

And this is what we have spent the last fifty years systematically forgetting, dismantling, monetizing, and reducing to the level of a streaming statistic.

We did this on purpose.

We need to talk about how, and we need to talk about why.

Because that is the only way to understand what comes next.

Walk into a British secondary school music classroom in 2026.

If the school still has one.

Half of them do not.

GCSE music entries in the United Kingdom have roughly halved since 2010. Roughly halved. In fifteen years. In one of the wealthiest countries on earth, in the country that gave the world The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bowie, Queen, Radiohead, Oasis, Adele and Ed Sheeran, half of the schools that were teaching children how to read music a generation ago are no longer teaching it.

Open the door.

The drum kit is in the corner, stacked behind a stack of plastic chairs.

The piano lid is closed. The piano is locked. The key is in a drawer somewhere in the head of department's office and nobody is sure who has the spare.

The acoustic guitars are in a metal cabinet against the wall with the strings half-tuned. Three of them have broken strings that have not been replaced for two years.

The music teacher is gone.

The position was cut to balance the budget after the third round of austerity. The room is now used twice a week for math revision and four times a week for storage. There is a sign on the door that says Music, in the optimistic plastic lettering of a decade ago, but the sign has not been updated and the room has not been a music room for a long time.

This is one room.

Now multiply it by every school in the country.

Now widen the lens.

Look at what was built in your city in the last forty years.

Now look at what was built a hundred years before that.

Look at what was built a thousand years before that.

You will not find a single building constructed in the last forty years that anyone will travel to see in five hundred years' time.

The cathedrals are still standing. We just stopped building them.

We replaced them with retail parks, business parks, science parks, and out-of-town shopping centers. We replaced them with car parks. We replaced them with airports designed to be photographed and forgotten. We replaced them with office buildings that have no architect's name attached because no architect wanted their name attached.

The most expensive new buildings in the West, the towers and stadiums and corporate headquarters that cost billions of pounds to construct, are not designed for the human beings who walk past them every day.

They are designed for the drone shot.

They are designed for the press release.

They are designed for the architect's portfolio.

They are not designed for the soul of the person who has to live in their shadow.

Roger Scruton said it as cleanly as anyone could.

And.

He was right.

Walk through the contemporary art wing of any major museum and ask yourself what your grandchildren will say when they stand in front of it in fifty years' time. A urinal on a pedestal. A shark in a tank. A pile of bricks. An unmade bed. A banana taped to a wall.

This is what we have built when we had access to every technique, every material, every technology, and every accumulated lesson of forty thousand years of human art.

It is not that the work is bad.

It is that the work is small.

It does not believe in anything large enough to be worth making something great about.

The philosopher Iain McGilchrist diagnoses this with surgical precision. His argument, drawn from decades of research into the divided brain, is that the right hemisphere is the part of us that sees the whole, that grasps context, that hears music, that knows beauty, that feels the sacred. The left hemisphere is the part of us that measures, that categorizes, that abstracts, that reduces things to parts and then mistakes the parts for the thing itself.

A healthy culture, McGilchrist argues, balances the two.

A sick culture lets the left hemisphere stage a coup against the right.

That is what has happened to us.

We have replaced beauty with metrics. We have replaced meaning with measurement. We have replaced art with content. We have replaced music with playlists. We have replaced architecture with renderings. We have replaced literature with engagement. We have replaced film with intellectual property.

Joseph Campbell, in his work on myth, identified four functions that any healthy culture must perform. The mystical. The cosmological. The sociological. The pedagogical. The way a culture teaches its young how to live a human life under any circumstances.

All four functions have collapsed in our time.

And the reason they have collapsed is that the people who used to perform those functions, the artists, the poets, the painters, the composers, the storytellers, have been demoted from the center of the culture to its margins.

They have been turned into content creators.

They have been turned into product.

They have been turned into a side hustle, performed in the gaps left by a real job that pays the bills.

And the cost is not abstract.

The cost is measurable in the bodies of the young.

Rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide in the West have risen, in some categories, by more than 50% in the last fifteen years.

Deaths of despair, the term coined by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to describe the collapse in life expectancy among working-age adults in the United States from drug overdose, alcohol, and suicide, have removed more years of American life in the last twenty-five years than HIV did in the entire epidemic.

A culture that has stopped producing serious art is a culture that has stopped knowing how to live, and the bodies of its young are the place where the bill comes due.

This is not a coincidence.

This is the predictable consequence of a civilization that has put a urinal on a pedestal and called it a masterpiece, and put its children in a classroom where the piano is locked and the music teacher is gone.

We did this.

We did this on purpose.

We did this for fifty years.

And we have nearly finished.

The good news, the news that the rest of this piece is built on, is that nearly finished is not the same as finished.

We are at the lowest point.

Which means the only direction left to go is up.

And something is already rising.

For the first time in human history, the artist does not need a king.

The artist does not need a pope. The artist does not need a Medici. The artist does not need a gallery, a label, a publisher, a studio, a network, a manager, or a distributor.

The artist needs an audience.

And the audience is already here.

This is the part of the story that nobody has fully reckoned with yet. Because the change has happened so quickly that most of the people inside the industry have not lifted their heads up long enough to see it.

For five hundred years, beginning roughly with the Medici and accelerating through every century since, the artist's career has run through a gate.

The gate was the patron.

Then the gate was the church.

Then the gate was the publisher.

Then the gate was the gallery, the label, the studio, the broadcaster, the press, the agent, the distributor.

The pattern was always the same. The artist made the work. The gatekeeper decided whether the world got to see it. The gatekeeper kept most of the money. The artist was supposed to be grateful for the access.

That entire five-hundred-year arrangement has collapsed in the last fifteen years.

It collapsed because of a piece of technology that the artist now carries in their pocket.

It collapsed because of a wire.

A wire that runs, uninterrupted, from the artist's bedroom to every other bedroom on earth.

Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel for an audience of cardinals and pilgrims who had to physically travel to Rome to see it. The audience for the Sistine, over five centuries, has been somewhere in the tens of millions of people, and most of them have only seen reproductions.

A single artist in 2026, working alone from a bedroom in São Paulo or Lagos or Manchester, can reach a hundred million people in a week.

Not over five centuries.

In a week.

The Medici fortune funded Michelangelo. The modern artist needs Wi-Fi.

The infrastructure that took the Renaissance two hundred years to build, the printing presses, the workshops, the academies, the patronage networks, the trade routes, the universities, has all been compressed into a rectangular slab of glass and aluminum that fits in a back pocket and costs less than a month's rent.

This has never happened before.

Not in the history of the species.

We are the first generation of human beings for whom the technology of mass cultural creation, distribution, and connection is in the hands of the makers themselves, not the gatekeepers.

And yet most of the people standing on this runway have not understood, yet, what they are standing on.

Most artists, including most professional artists, are still operating with the mental model of a system that no longer exists. They are still waiting to be picked. They are still looking for the gatekeeper to bless their work. They are still treating the platforms as places to apply for a job, when the platforms are actually the means of production.

They are sitting on the runway of the largest cultural flowering in human history and waiting for someone to give them permission to fly.

That is the gap.

That is the gap we are here to close.

The full vision is laid out in the presentation. You can watch it [here].

The movement has a name.

We are calling it The Rising.

The Rising is a twelve-month campaign designed to wake up musical artists at scale. Not to teach them new tricks. Not to sell them another course. To wake them up to what they are actually standing in front of, and to build them the operating system they need to walk through it.

Because the artist who understands this moment, and the artist who has the infrastructure to act on it, is not just an artist anymore.

They are a cultural force the like of which the world has never seen.

Michelangelo could reach a few thousand people in his lifetime. Beethoven could reach a few tens of thousands. The Beatles, with the help of every broadcaster on earth, could reach a few hundred million across their entire career. A single great artist in this generation, with the right infrastructure underneath them, can reach more human beings in five years than every artist before them in the history of the Western canon combined.

And the question that question opens is the question this entire essay has been building toward.

If one artist can now reach a hundred million people, what should they do with that reach?

Most of the music industry's current answer is sell them more streams.

That is the answer of an industry that has forgotten what it is for.

There is a better answer.

The artist should use that reach to wake up every single person in that audience.

Not as a fan.

As an artist.

Because here is the thing the diagnosis was leading us toward.

The collapse of beauty in our culture. The collapse of music education. The collapse of public architecture. The collapse of communal art making. The collapse in adolescent mental health. The deaths of despair. The Sahara of meaning that has replaced what the cathedrals used to do.

The reason all of those collapses are happening at the same time is that they are the same collapse.

They are the same collapse because they all share a common cause.

Human beings need to create art.

It is like breathing.

Not the kind of breathing you do automatically without thinking about it. The kind of breathing you do at the top of a mountain when the air is thin, when you have to consciously expand your lungs to take in enough oxygen to think clearly. That kind of breathing. The kind of breathing the body knows how to do but only does properly when the person remembers to do it.

Every human being is born with the capacity to create.

The toddler who arranges the stones on the beach into a circle is creating.

The teenager who writes the song in their bedroom is creating.

The grandmother who cooks the recipe she has refined over fifty years is creating.

The engineer who designs the bridge is creating.

The schoolteacher who finds a way to explain photosynthesis that makes the children lean forward is creating.

This is not a metaphor. This is what the species is.

Whether you call it the breath of God. Whether you call it source. Whether you call it the muse. Whether you call it the creative principle of the universe. Whether you call it nothing at all and just call it the biology of being human.

The same thing is moving through every human being who has ever been alive, and that thing wants to come out.

When it comes out, the human being is whole.

When it does not come out, the human being is sick.

And what we have done, for the last hundred years, is build a civilization that systematically prevents the breath from coming out.

We have told the child that art is a hobby and that the real work is something else.

We have told the teenager that there is no money in music and that they should study something serious.

We have told the adult that their creativity is something to be monetized, optimized, or kept on the side of a real job that pays the bills.

We have built schools that teach to the test and remove the music room.

We have built workplaces that demand the suppression of the very faculties that make us human.

We have built a culture in which a person can live an entire life and never make a single thing.

And we are surprised, we are actually surprised, that the rates of depression and anxiety and self-harm and despair are what they are.

The crisis of our time is not an economic crisis.

It is not a political crisis.

It is not a technological crisis.

It is a respiratory crisis.

The species has stopped breathing through its hands.

This is what The Rising is for.

It is for the artists who are about to become the most influential figures of the next hundred years, because the runway has never been wider and the audience has never been more ready.

It is for the audience members who will be reached by those artists and will hear, perhaps for the first time in their adult lives, that they themselves are artists. That they were born with a faculty that has been beaten out of them. That they can pick it back up at any age, in any condition, in any circumstance.

It is for the new patrons, the new makers, the new ecosystem of creators, engineers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who will gather around the great artists of this generation the way the entire Florentine economy gathered around Michelangelo.

It is for a world that has been holding its breath for a hundred years and is finally about to exhale.

And it is the reason B A K E R Y exists.

We are not building a music company.

We are building a piece of civilizational infrastructure.

We are building the operating system that the artist of the next century needs to do the work that the world is waiting for.

And we are building it now because now is the moment.

Now is when the gates have collapsed.

Now is when the audience is ready.

Now is when the artist can step forward and become what they were always meant to be.

Which raises the obvious question.

What does that world actually look like.

Let me show you.

Picture it.

A morning in a city, somewhere in the world, fifteen years from now.

A father walks his daughter to school past a wall that was bare a year ago and is now a mural, three storeys tall, painted by a local artist whose name everyone on the street knows. The artist was commissioned by the neighborhood, funded by the people who walk past the wall every day, and paid as well as the architect of the building behind it.

The daughter does not stop to look at the mural any more than a Florentine child in 1480 stopped to look at the David. She walks past it the way you walk past furniture. It is part of the room she grew up in.

The room she grew up in is a city that takes art seriously again.

She arrives at school. The music room is open. The piano is unlocked. The guitars have new strings. There is a music teacher who knows the names of all the children in her class and who teaches the way a music teacher in 1920 might have taught, because music is once again considered as important as mathematics.

At lunchtime the children sing.

They sing the way the children at Lascaux must have sung, the way the children in every village in every century before this one sang. Not because they have been told to. Because singing together is what humans have always done when they are in a room together and they trust each other.

After school, the father goes back to the workshop where he runs his business. He is a software engineer. He works perhaps twenty-five hours a week. The AI agents in his team handle the bulk of what used to take him fifty hours, and the work is better, not worse, because he now spends his time on the parts of the job that only a human being can do.

The other twenty-five hours of his week he spends in a string quartet. He has played the viola since he was nine. They rehearse on Thursday evenings in a converted church around the corner from his house. They perform once a month in a small venue that holds two hundred people, and they are paid for it, because the city has built a patronage system that funds local artistic life the way previous centuries funded the church and the public library.

He is not famous.

He does not need to be.

He is an artist living in a city that knows what an artist is and is glad to have him in it.

This is what we are building toward.

This vision is not utopian.

Everything in it has existed before.

The Florentines did most of it in the fifteenth century. The Viennese did it in the eighteenth. The English market towns did it in the nineteenth. The German guilds did it for five hundred years. Every healthy human culture in history has done a version of it.

We have just stopped doing it for about a hundred years, and we have forgotten that we ever knew how.

But here is the thing that makes this moment unlike any of the previous renaissances.

For the first time in human history, we have the time.

The Florentine artist had to be funded by a banking family because the rest of the population was working dawn to dusk in fields or workshops just to stay alive. The eighteenth-century symphony composer had to be funded by a prince because the rest of the population could not afford a violin let alone the time to learn one.

Every previous renaissance in history was a renaissance of the few, because most human beings were too busy surviving to participate.

That constraint is about to disappear.

The technological revolution we are living through, AI, automation, decentralised work, robotics, energy abundance, is doing something to the structure of human time that no previous technological revolution has done.

It is giving the time back.

The forty-hour week is collapsing. The forty-year career is collapsing. The forty-year mortgage on the forty-year career is collapsing. The whole architecture of the industrial age, in which the human being was expected to trade most of their waking hours for the right to survive, is being dismantled in real time, and what is being built in its place is a future in which the average human being will have more discretionary hours in a week than at any point since the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago.

This is the era of abundance.

It is real. It is arriving. It is faster than most people understand.

And the question that this era is going to put to every human being alive is the question that has only ever been put, in previous centuries, to the aristocracy and the artist.

What will you do with your time?

The wrong answer is more passive consumption. More scrolling. More streaming. More watching. More numbing.

The wrong answer is the answer the current platforms are designed to harvest from us.

The right answer is the answer that every human culture, before the industrial age, considered obvious.

You make things.

You make music. You make food that is more than fuel. You make conversation that is more than transaction. You make stories. You make buildings. You make gardens. You make children who are loved. You make a life that someone will want to remember after you are gone.

You become an artist.

The era of abundance is also, by necessity, the era of the artist. Not because we have decided it should be. Because the moment human beings are given time freedom at scale, the species reveals what it was actually built to do.

And what it was built to do is create.

Now layer the artists into the city.

The musical artists, the ones that B A K E R Y is built to amplify, are the leaders of this transformation. They are the ones with the largest audiences, the most cultural reach, the most direct emotional access to the lives of millions of strangers.

When a great musical artist stands in front of a hundred million people in this era, they will not be selling them more streams.

They will be telling them, over and over again, in the language of song, that the audience is the artist too. That the moment one of the people watching the show puts down their phone and picks up a brush, or a guitar, or a sewing needle, or a pen, the entire reason the artist did the work in the first place has been fulfilled.

The audience will hear this. The audience has been waiting to hear this for fifty years.

And the audience will begin to make things.

The teenager in the bedroom will record their first song. The mother who used to paint before the children were born will pick the brush back up. The accountant who has not played the trumpet since university will join the local brass band. The widower who has spent five years staring at the television will start writing the book about his childhood that he has been carrying around in his head since 1972.

Multiply that by a hundred million.

Then multiply that by every great artist of the next twenty years.

Then multiply that by the time freedom that the technology revolution is about to put in the hands of every working adult in the developed world.

That is the planetary renaissance.

It is not coming because we have decided to make it come. It is coming because the species, given the chance, has always made it come.

And the role of B A K E R Y in this picture is to be the operating system underneath the artists who lead it.

To make sure that the great artists of the next twenty years do not waste their reach selling another stream. That they have the infrastructure, the education, the technology, the ecosystem, and the financial structure to operate at the scale that this moment is asking of them.

We are not the renaissance.

The renaissance is the artists.

We are the workshop. The patronage system. The road network. The printing press. The thing that sits behind the artist and allows the artist to do the work.

The renaissance is theirs.

Our job is to make sure that, when the species finally remembers how to breathe through its hands, the artists who are leading it have everything they need to take the species the rest of the way home.

This is the part most artists have not understood about themselves yet.

They think they are making music. They think they are writing songs. They think they are recording albums and shooting videos and selling tickets and trying to build a career.

All of that is true.

It is also the smaller half of what they are doing.

The larger half, the half almost no one has named out loud, is that every artist who steps forward in this moment becomes a permission machine.

When a teenager in a bedroom in Manchester watches a clip of an independent artist they love and sees that the artist made the song on a laptop with a microphone that cost two hundred pounds, something happens inside the teenager. A wall comes down. A whisper begins. Maybe I could.

That whisper is the most important sound in the modern world.

The artist who builds an audience of a hundred million people in this era is not just entertaining a hundred million people. They are sending the whisper into a hundred million bedrooms. They are giving a hundred million people, most of whom have spent their entire adult lives being told that art is something other people do, the quiet, private, undeniable permission to begin.

Most of those hundred million will not become professional artists. That is not the point.

The point is that they will make something.

And the act of making, repeated across a hundred million people, multiplied by every great artist of the next twenty years, is what causes the planetary renaissance to actually happen.

The artist makes the work.

The audience receives the permission.

The audience makes their work.

The audience's work reaches someone else.

That person receives the permission.

And the chain continues, generation by generation, until the species remembers what it was.

This is the work.

This is what the great musical artist of this era is actually being asked to do.

The artists who understand this, and who step into it with full awareness, are something the world has not seen in a very long time.

They are not entertainers.

They are not content creators.

They are not influencers.

They are cultural physicians, working on the central illness of our time, which is the disconnection of the human being from their own capacity to create. They are modern polymath, descended in spirit from the four we walked through earlier in this piece, working across music and film and design and fashion and writing and architecture and education and technology and business, because the medium is no longer separate from the message, and the artist who operates at scale today has to be many things at once or be left behind.

They are also, and this is the part that most of the political and economic establishment has not woken up to yet, the most powerful leaders of the next hundred years.

A politician can reach a few tens of millions of people, mostly the ones inside their own borders, mostly the ones inclined to agree with them before they speak.

A great musical artist can reach a few hundred million people across every border and every demographic, including the people who would never read a political article and never watch a political speech, including the people who have stopped trusting institutions entirely, including the children who are growing up in the wreckage of the last century and looking for someone to tell them what to do with their lives.

The trust the public used to place in priests, in newspapers, in politicians, in academics, has not disappeared. It has migrated. It has moved.

It has moved to the artists.

And the artists, almost all of them, do not yet understand that they are now carrying the weight of it.

That is why this moment matters so much.

Because the artists who realize what they are carrying, who pick it up consciously and step forward with it, become the most important figures of the next century.

And the artists who do not realize it, who keep treating their reach as a marketing problem and their audience as a customer base, are going to look back in twenty years and realize they were sitting on the most powerful microphone in the history of the species and used it to sell t-shirts.

Which brings us to the question.

Who is an artist.

I have spent twenty years thinking about this question, and I have arrived at a definition that I believe is the correct one. It is the definition my company is built on. It is the definition that everything I have written in this piece has been building toward.

Under that definition, the musicians, the painters, the writers, the directors and the dancers qualify, obviously.

But so does the software engineer who designs a system so elegant that the people who use it call it a work of art.

So does the teacher who finds a way to unlock the potential of a child that nobody else in the system was able to reach.

So does the entrepreneur who builds something from nothing, against the odds, because they cannot rest until the vision is real.

So does the chef who refines a single dish for thirty years until it is the most honest expression they can offer of who they are.

So does the parent who raises children with such conscious craft that the children themselves go on to make the world bigger.

Under this definition, the world is full of artists.

Most of them do not know they are artists yet.

Most of them have been told their entire lives that art is something else, something for other people, something they are not allowed to claim.

The role of the great musical artist of this era is to walk onto the stage, with their hundred million people watching, and tell them.

You are an artist too.

You always were.

You just forgot.

If you are reading this and you are a musical artist, you are reading the description of your job.

If you are reading this and you are anything else, you are reading the description of who you have always been underneath whatever the world has been calling you.

Either way, the work is the same.

You make the thing only you can make.

You make it because you must.

You make it knowing that the act of making is, in itself, the first answer to every problem this piece has named.

And in making it, you give one other person, somewhere, the permission to make theirs.

That is what the artist is for.

That is what art has always been for.

We are simply, after a hundred years of forgetting, about to remember.

Art can solve the world's problems.

Now you know why I believe it.

You have walked with me from the cave at Lascaux, where a human being seventeen thousand years ago pressed pigment to limestone and built the first library the species ever made.

You have walked through Egypt and Greece and Rome and the medieval cathedrals and the streets of Florence, and you have seen, in every century, the same truth proved again. Politics builds the scaffold. Art builds the building. The scaffold is taken down.

You have stood with Hildegard in her abbey and with Brunelleschi at his dome and with Leonardo at his notebooks and with Michelangelo at his marble, and you have seen what a fully integrated human mind looks like when it refuses the false separation between art and life.

You have sat with Stowe at her kitchen table. You have watched Picasso paint Guernica. You have stood on Route 1 in 1972. You have seen what one Irish singer with a telephone did to forty years of Western foreign policy.

You have heard the men in the trenches sing Silent Night across frozen mud and stop killing each other for a day.

You have seen the music classroom locked. You have seen the cathedrals not being built. You have seen the bodies of the young carrying the bill for what the culture has stopped paying.

And you have seen, finally, what is rising.

You are not standing outside this picture. You are standing inside it. Whether you are a musical artist with an audience of ten people or ten million people, whether you are a software engineer or a teacher or a parent or a chef or a builder of any kind of thing, the work this essay has described is your work too.

The species needs you to begin.

It does not matter that you are not ready. It does not matter that you do not have the equipment. It does not matter that you do not know what to call yourself.

You are an artist.

You always were.

The only thing you have to do, today, is the smallest possible act of making.

Sing in the kitchen.

Open the notebook.

Pick up the instrument that has been in the cupboard for fifteen years.

Sit down at the keyboard, the wheel, the easel, the desk, the stove.

Make one thing.

It does not have to be good. It does not have to be seen. It does not have to be anything other than yours.

Because in the act of making it, you will be doing the oldest thing the species has ever done. You will be breathing through your hands. You will be putting one more brick into the building that humanity has been constructing, mostly by lamplight, for forty thousand years.

And if you are one of the musical artists this piece has been written for, the artists who are about to become the most powerful figures of the next hundred years, your work is bigger than your work.

Your work is to step forward. To carry the weight you are already carrying, consciously. To use your reach to wake every single person in your audience to the artist inside them. To become the cultural physician your moment needs.

The Rising is the campaign. B A K E R Y is the operating system underneath it. The presentation tells you the rest.

But the move is yours.

Art can solve the world's problems.

We are the ones who get to do it.

The time to do is now.

Kind regards,

- The Baker

Solving The World's Problems Through Art | #thetimetodoisnow