I will never forget seeing Alberto Giacometti’s La Place (City Square) for the first time. It is a sculpture of several people crossing a city square. The figures are rooted to the ground, weighed down by limbs that seem more designed for stasis than for moving. They walk—or somnambulate—with their eyes mindlessly looking ahead, not recognizing anyone or speaking. Their faces are enigmas to me: what thoughts and horrors hide behind their soulless eyes?

When I walk on the streets of my own city, I am unable to shake that image from my mind. In the city square we walk in great rivers, moving between the buildings to a thousand different places; we look up at the skyscrapers and into the shops, but we avoid making eye contact with one another. In the subway we stare off into the darkness, in spite of being surrounded by each other, by human beings who are in truth much stranger, unpredictable, and interesting creatures than Giacometti’s automata.

It is obvious, if you read Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, or Gene Wolfe—or if you talk to nearly anyone for long enough—that humans are capable of almost absurdly intense pathos, of loving and hating with all the furor of gods. What is it, then, that keeps us so quiet? What is it that deprives us of a meaningful public discourse and a truly social existence?

I believe that our difficulty in communication comes because our emotions have been appropriated. Like so much that we ought to hold sacred, pathos has been turned into capital. We buy bread from the baker so that we will not need to make our own bread, and we buy our emotion from the entertainment industry because we would rather be told what to dream. Imagination is too expensive to cultivate on one’s own, after all, when there are so many people writing books and making movies and singing songs. Intellectuals and couch potatoes alike, we are being told what to think, fear, and feel. The news tells us what the weather will be and what to wear. The soap operas and nightly comedies tell us what shapes and sizes of humans we will love, and what words we will use when we think we are in love. A movie makes us fear, love, and hate, in rhythm to the music playing in the background and the various tricks of camera angles. Textbook authors and professors impress us with long lists of citations and established canons of thinking. Songwriters suffer lost love, poverty, and social injustice, and present us with a conveniently packaged CD that can be bought for a reasonable price.

None of this prepackaged tripe is satisfying to me. I want to live an unexpected life, to discover what to fear on my own, and to make up my own words for being in love. I cringe when I hear words coming from my mouth that I heard somewhere else, that do not come from my own joys and my own anguish. I hate hearing those words from other people: I want to know what they think, not what they just saw on TV.

We are humans, and the human experience is inextricably dangerous. It is dangerous because we have such intense emotions, and it is a necessary condition of being human that we must come to some sort of truce with those emotions. We have to reconcile anger and love, fear and desire. It is the wrong solution for anyone to take anger and hatred and transform it into violence; yet Hollywood takes that solution and puts it up on the screen, and we pay money to see the moving pictures and we give the actors and directors awards for grit and “realism”. What we are really doing is paying them to take our dangerous thoughts away from us. True, they are dangerous, but they are also human, and it is cheating to pay someone else to feel our way through the universe. We get a sort of peace in return, a sort of new world order; but it is the peace of death and a new world order that comes about because there are no people willing to fight for anything.

The modern, capitalistic art that we call entertainment is ultimately a usurpation of the quest for beauty and human meaning. It palliates and insulates, when art requires the lash of reality. There is an apt metaphor for its tyranny in Yuri Olesha’s fantastic book Envy. The story is about two brothers. One is building the Quarter, a complex of cafeterias and food processing machines that will feed a whole city. The Quarter will take away the housewives’ daylong struggles to create “miserable puddles of borscht” and provide them with wholesome and nutritious food. At the opening of the Quarter the other brother leads a one-man attack on the Quarter and everything it stands for. He interrupts the ceremonies and asks, “What are you going to give us that we can’t do already: love, hate, hope, weep, pity, and forgive?” We might ask the same thing of the entertainment industry.

But what good is there in art, then, if in giving us dreams it prevents us from having our own? Is it tyranny for the artist to produce a work of pathos and beauty, if by doing so she provides us with emotions that we ought to figure out ourselves? Did Alberto Giacometti inculcate me with his own alienation by making La Place, and (I am aware of the irony) and thereby cause me to write this?

If we take La Place seriously, we are meant to interact with our neighbors—to share dreams. The search for a solution to the conflicts of human existence is not a personal one alone. Without books and art and music, I would not have even begun to ask these questions of myself. And without revealing my own attempts at answers, I neither learn nor teach, and do not grow past my own experiences. Perhaps we have not defined art correctly, if we can include art that is sold and bought, that is merely a materialistic, economic, band-aid fulfillment of an infinite hunger for truth and meaning.

There are no easy or obvious answers to that hunger. And true art differs from tyranny in that it does not claim to present final answers. It is not like a crucifix that you can buy and nail to your wall and sleep soundly thereafter. It is not a self-help book you can store on a shelf and browse occasionally. Art challenges by being incomplete. Muslim painters would always leave one flaw in a work so that it would be imperfect, so it would not take the place of the living God. Art does not merely create: it creates the desire to create, and the need to continue searching.

It is time to liberate the act of creation from the swamps of advertising, record companies, and bestseller lists. As artists we must be more concerned about communication than expression; we must reject academic disputes of form and substance; we must not become dependent on our media in such a way that the creation of beauty seems impossible to the rest of the world; we must turn aside from high-fidelity, glossiness, and beautiful covers. We must preach imperfection, low-fidelity, and unobvious beauty.

Of course, such things will not sell. But sales and profits are not what art is about, and so long as art remains shackled to those ideals, it will be incapable of changing anything. Art is one of the cornerstones of civilization; perhaps if we change our artistic priorities, the economy will have to change as well, and we will have a world in which money and possessions become our tools and not our masters. Perhaps we will have a world in which we will no longer be afraid to rejoice in the public square at the beauty of nature and the beauty of people, in which we live our own lives and are unafraid to do so. And that is the stuff of revolution.