People have learned to foresee the natural disasters coming. By reading different measurements of earth movements, they can say when an earthquake will occur, if a tsunami will follow, and where it will hit. They even learned to calculate the movement of the stars and the trajectory of falling meteorites. So why have we not learned yet to measure and evaluate the processes that happen in society long before a conflict breaks out to warn people or even to make them prevent it? - That is a question that struck me lately while listening to a podcast.

My immediate reaction as a very compassionate person, and feeling how the earth is “trembling” under my feet right now, was - Finally, someone acknowledges the power of emotions and intuition in a public discourse! I would also add to the conversation that artists, extremely sensitive people, palpate the invisible undercurrents that are going on in society and often translate these indefinable vibrations and feelings into their artistic practices. Often, they do not realize until the end what’s what they depicted. This might happen long ago before the majority of society realizes this shift, e.g. Bruegel's “Triumph of Death”, “1984” Orwell or the whole futurist literature.

I am often surprised when speaking with artists living in different countries, you find out that they notice similar shifts going on in society and start elaborating on them, long before this discourse comes to headlines or is being discussed at dinner tables.

Being an artist is quite a lonely job - you’re mostly in your studio compressing and transcribing all the impulses that you’ve received in the outer world. You’re a trained observer, analyst, - with a set of different “lenses” on your eye. You learn to speak openly with people and become genuinely interested in hearing their stories. Before having big data analytics centers, artists proved that a compilation of the micro-narratives can tell a lot about the condition of society as a whole.