Artists Don’t Erase Tragedy, They Help Us Continue Living After It

Last week was hard.

Each morning seemed to bring another reminder of how fragile our common life has become. We mourned beloved artists whose work had quietly accompanied us for decades. Floods, fires, and storms swept away homes and livelihoods. Civilians were assaulted in cities that once felt ordinary.

Political decisions continued to unsettle institutions many assumed would endure. And beneath all of it ran a quieter loss: the growing sense that we no longer share the same understanding of what is happening around us.

I’ve lived long enough to know that suffering has never been in short supply. What has changed is the speed with which we are expected to absorb it.

Before we finish grieving one tragedy, another arrives. Before we understand one crisis, the news has already moved on to the next. Somewhere along the way, I wonder whether we’ve begun confusing information with understanding.

Information tells us what happened. Understanding helps us continue living after it.

And that distinction matters, because I’ve noticed something else. Whenever societies experience profound loss, artists quietly go to work. Not because they can reverse what happened. Because someone has to help us carry what happened.

When terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, architects did not design a monument that explained September 11. They designed a place where grief could live.

The National September 11 Memorial does not argue a political position or tell visitors what conclusions to reach. It offers something quieter and more necessary: a place where strangers can stand together in the presence of absence. The sound of falling water, nearly 3,000 names etched into bronze, the footprints of towers that are no longer there … all remind us that memory is not simply something we possess. It is something we practice.

The memorial doesn’t explain September 11. It gives us somewhere to carry it.

The German artist Käthe Kollwitz spent much of her life drawing grief. After losing her son in the First World War, she returned again and again to mothers, fathers, workers, widows, and children trying to live after unbearable loss. Her work rarely depicts battle. It dwells instead on what violence leaves behind.

Looking at her drawings and sculptures, we are reminded that history is never experienced by nations alone. It is experienced by families, neighbors, and ordinary people trying to find tomorrow after yesterday has become unimaginable.

Different disciplines. Different centuries. The same human calling.

Artists don’t erase tragedy. They help civilization continue after tragedy.

Lately I’ve found myself grieving something else.

Many of us no longer trust that we are seeing the same reality. We question headlines, images, videos, statistics, and even our own eyes. We wonder what was omitted, what was amplified, what disappeared before anyone had time to notice. Whether those suspicions are justified in every instance is almost beside the point.

A healthy society depends on more than facts. It depends on shared attention.

If we can no longer agree on what deserves our attention, compassion begins to fracture. Public grief becomes fragmented. Some losses become impossible to ignore while others pass almost unnoticed.

That concerns me. Not simply because journalism matters, though it does. Because every society depends on people willing to bear honest witness to what is happening.

Artists have always been among those witnesses.

Over the past several months, I’ve spent hours listening to artists imagine the future. I expected conversations about funding, audiences, careers, or the challenges of working in an increasingly uncertain world.

Instead, I kept hearing something deeper: memory, belonging, beauty, truth, and the desire to help communities remain human when history seems determined to pull them apart.

The more I listened, the more I realized we may have misunderstood the role of artists all along. We often describe the arts as entertainment. Entertainment is certainly one thing artists do.

History suggests something larger.

Artists help societies metabolize experience. They transform grief into memory, memory into meaning, and meaning into the courage to continue. They remind us that tragedy is never the whole story, even when it feels like the only story.

Human beings survive by making meaning together. Artists help us do that.

Months ago, I wrote an essay titled Come Build Beside Me. Looking back, I realize I was reaching for something I could not yet fully explain.

Res Creativa is not asking artists to rescue democracy. It is asking something both simpler and more demanding.

What does humanity need from creative people now?

I don’t pretend to know every answer. But I have become convinced of this: as our world becomes more automated, monetized, digitized, and polarized, the human capacities that artists practice every day become increasingly valuable. Attention. Curiosity. Imagination. Memory. The ability to help people see one another again after fear, violence, or grief have narrowed their vision.

Those capacities belong to all of us. Artists have simply refused to let them disappear.

Living through several eras of upheaval has taught me this: no generation chooses its moment. Only its response.

Mine has watched extraordinary people and extraordinary things disappear, and watched extraordinary people and extraordinary things emerge. I’ve learned to be skeptical of predictions that civilization is ending, and equally skeptical of promises that technology alone will save it.

What has earned my confidence instead are the human capacities that have carried us through every previous age of upheaval: curiosity, imagination, generosity, and the willingness to make something together before anyone can guarantee it will succeed.

Those capacities are still here.

I’ve seen them.

And that gives me reason for hope.

A version of this post was cross-posted on Substack, Aug 30, 2026

Banner image: Käthe Kollwitz, Women and Children (Vrouwen en kinderen), 1919, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain. Kollwitz understood that war is experienced not only on battlefields, but in kitchens, homes, and families. Her work reminds us that artists do not erase tragedy. They help us continue living after it.