Let them make art, not war

2026-03-16 - 03:04

If I said there was a drug that reduced stress, pain, and depression, improved the function of bodily organs, built new neural pathways, enhanced resilience, was preventative against dementia and was available free of charge to absolutely everyone while being completely without negative side effects, no one would believe me. Yet there is one. It’s called art. Please, hear me out. I was at a conference recently about our global “permacrisis”, a word that was coined in the 1970s and was “word of the year” in 2022 during the pandemic, and now, right now, everything feels a whole lot like a permacrisis. So how do we cope? One of the conference delegates was a Cold War-era artist from what was then Eastern Europe. His father had been a prisoner in a Russian concentration camp and only survived with his sanity intact thanks to... poetry. ALSO READ: Cartoon of the day: 10 March 2026 Every night, he and his fellow prisoners would recite remembered scraps of poetry to each other. They also told jokes. Beauty and laughter sustained them. Ultimately, the artist’s father told him, when everything else is taken away, all we have left is humour and the arts. And as I draw yet another funny face on top of yet another newspaper photograph of some powerful person with limitless capability and zero culpability, I think art, yes, art. Let’s all get creative. The thing is, art is not a luxury or entertainment – it just feels that way. Being creative is scientifically proven to be vital for our health. Prof Daisy Fancourt has written an instant bestseller about this very thing called Art Cure – admittedly still on my must-read pile – and, to put it in a gilded, mosaicked nutshell, art makes us healthier. It starts with childhood songs supporting brain development and continues into adulthood, where any form of creative engagement is protective against a range of ailments, both physical and psychological. And the best thing is, you don’t even need to be good at it. It’s the doing that counts, not the end result. Creative hobbies and crafting – from scrapbooking to cake-baking to crocheting – dancing, singing, poetry, reading novels, painting, playing and listening to music, going to galleries, museums and gigs... all are beneficial, even just for a few minutes a day. And as for the agents of this permacrisis, let’s give them all crayons and colouring books. Let them make art, not war. READ NEXT: Cartoon of the day: 11 March 2026