By Ellerine Diengdoh
Oh look, World Art Day is here again, time to pretend we give a damn! Quick, assemble the committee. No, not the artists, you morons, don’t be absurd! What do they know about “Art”. Get the real experts, the PR guys, the event managers, the blokes with “culture” in their job title and none in their soul. Let them decide how best to honour art, maybe a banner, an empty speech and while you are at it, paint a few tires and a few walls white, we cannot have a celebration without whitewashed garbage.
Listen and listen well, the first rule is to erase the local artists. Erase them so thoroughly that even they start to doubt they were ever here. These nobodies, these dreamers who dared to spend years honing their craft, pouring their time, their sweat, their souls into something real. Whose work reminds you of land, of struggle, of blood, forget them! They’re inconvenient, they’re messy. They ask questions like, “Where’s our space?” or “Why aren’t we being paid?” or the audacity of “Isn’t that our idea?” We can’t have that. No, no, we cannot have that kind of negativity!
Rule number two, outsource them, those “real artists”, the ones with grants, sponsors(with shady middle men), glossy portfolios, foreign accents and fancy Instagram handles. Fly them in, put them up, give them walls, streets, buildings, pebbles in your garden, anything they want to paint. Doesn’t matter if they know the place, doesn’t matter if they understand the culture(google that bit, it is not rocket science)just make sure they hashtag it right!!!! Now here’s the trick (whispers), include the locals just enough(3 or 4, not more)…..let them mix paint, hold ladders, say “collaboration” a lot, post a group photo with the caption “Bridging Communities”, then dump them quickly before they take “collaboration” seriously!
When they ask for payment, look shocked, feign amnesia, act wounded, tell them it is a “great opportunity” and insert,”we thought you were doing it from the heart!!!!” If they insist, block them! If they make noise, label them “unprofessional!” Nothing like good ole’ poverty to teach someone humility!
Meanwhile, funnel all the big projects through that one trusted gatekeeper. You know the one, the sellout with connections and no shame, the one who translates art into invoices, who signs the deals, takes the credit, and outsources the actual work to the same starving artists we will never ever acknowledge.
But you still ask, “what about the other work they did, remember, the one we paid a few hundred for?” Shove it in a corner of a government office next to broken chairs and termite-eaten files! Let it rot, let it disappear! The only art worth displaying is the kind that says nothing! Because art that speaks, is a problem!
Because when art starts to matter, people start to feel. And when people feel, they start to think. And when they think, well then the whole farce starts to fall apart. Because it is hard to sell the illusion once someone has seen behind the curtain. It’s hard to control people who’ve felt something real. It’s hard to lie to a heart that’s been cracked open by a song, a painting, a poem or a play that says what everyone is afraid to admit.
That’s the real danger, isn’t it? Not the art itself, but what it does to people. It connects things that were supposed to stay disconnected. It stirs memory, it wakes up anger, it softens cynicism just long enough to let in just a little ray of hope. And you must NOT have that in a system built on numbness and distraction! You CANNOT have people walking around suddenly aware. Aware of beauty, aware of injustice, aware of their own worth!
You know what happens if we acknowledge artists fully, if we really see what they hold up to us? We would have to face ourselves, and that is precisely what we don’t want to do, we are terrified of the reckoning art demands!
So of course art has to be neutralised, stripped of all meaning, sanitised, sponsored! Give it a little stage time, then pack it up quickly again into that tiny dusty box marked “culture”. You must keep it ornamental, you must keep it quiet!
That is why we now have AI to do the job, the perfect artist. Obedient, efficient and hollow. You see it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t break, it does not ask for space, for credit, for justice. It does not come with a history, it does not come with a voice, it just produces. A clean replacement for the messy, human thing that once dared to mean something. Because meaning is dangerous, meaning disrupts!
So here’s to World Art Day in Meghalaya.
To painting over the cracks, to funding silence, to token walls and unpaid hands, to “community engagement” without the community, to “promoting local talent” right after we’ve finished sidelining them, to the hands that blistered, calloused, broke and still create…..
Raise your brush, your voice, your fists if you must……because if you’re still making, you’re resisting! If you’re still here, they haven’t won!
(This piece was inspired by #MeghalayaArtResistance (14th &15th April All Saints Hall) and Anees Noronha’s “AI Generated Art & The Human” (April 1st, 2025) (https://medium.com/@aneesnoronha/ai-generated-art-the-human-978b56e0ab77)