Recently I was at a dinner party of my peers, which is to say: Not Young People. (Thus far, most Generation Xers refuse to refer to themselves as middle-aged, though we surely are.) The subject came around, as it inevitably does these days, to the Trump administration and the turmoil wracking our country and world (besides France). “Remember protest music?” said one friend. “I feel like there’s no protest music being made anymore.” “Dude,” said another. “I feel like there’s no protest art being made anymore, period.” On the way home, I realized how much I disagreed with that statement. One of the fundamental roles of art always has been to shed light on the human condition – to increase our empathy for each other. Even art that ostensibly focuses only on beauty – Monet’s lilies, for example, or ee cummings’s lowercase homages – is also about love and mortality, which brings us back to the human condition. Even the concept of “beauty” is subjective and intensely fraught; read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye if you need a refresher course on that concept.

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