Tiny Paper Boats pamphlet

Tiny Paper Boats — or, Why make art in a broken world? by David Gauntlett

In a world of injustice and racism, at a time where nobody thinks things are going really well, and a combination of authoritarian leaders, tech billionaires, climate change and AI threaten to destroy everything, what is the point of people making art, music or poetry?

David Gauntlett tries to assemble an answer, on a journey which takes us from an essay by Zadie Smith, to novelist E. M. Forster, and AI’s cultural violence. Subversive art critic Clement Greenberg suggests the meaning of the avant-garde, Black feminist pioneers bell hooks and Legacy Russell talk about carving out places to experiment and create – and we see how pop visionary hemlocke springs embodies that idea. We also take in the idea of queer abstraction, Joshua Whitehead on the inevitably political nature of existence, and Bogna Konior’s dark forest theory of the internet, as well as dissonance, acid house, and tiny paper boats.