The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is.

—Toni Morrison

All those kids—even their parents, hell even the other adult not-parents in there with them—shouldn’t be in that crappy fenced-off detention center underneath that overpass in Texas. Or really any detention center—even if it wasn’t in Texas they shouldn’t be there. Also, when those cops were just shooting people for no real reason and the people protesting it keep turning up dead—they should investigate them turning up dead. Also cops should not have been shooting people for no real reason to begin with, I think. In addition, I think rich people should not be spying on me or other people besides me using apps and selling our data to each other and the president should not be the most corrupt and dumb person anyone has ever even heard of. Internationally: they should stop electing Nazis. Also stop electing people here that are even kind of like Nazis. These are my stances and they are popular. Maybe not in the whole world but in the art-making and art-looking-at world, they are super-popular.

You could say one of these things at a table with art people and the other people there would be like “Yeah.” Bad things—they would agree—are bad. You could also probably get them to agree to subtler critiques of our current world situation, like you could go, “Any long-term project for the betterment of humanity requires prioritizing strategies of decolonization,” or “Despite a few benchmark achievements, mass media continues to unconsciously emphasize idealized heteronormative experiences in ways that negatively impact young people,” and probably they’d be like “Yeah,” also.

But you wouldn’t say any of these things—over dinner or drinks or lunch or at an opening. What would be the point? You’re not going to discuss, “Should we lock up some babies?” You probably wouldn’t even get that much pushback if you asked what to do about them.

Each age of humankind has been marked by unique challenges, ours just happen to be really stupid. It’s as if we were facing the Black Plague after germ theory was discovered.

“What to do?”

“Basic hygiene would help, and stop letting rats on everything.”

“Yup.”

“Yup …” (wistful glance at the corpse-barges floating low in Venetian sun across the canals).

“So how are the kids?”

Artists are extremely poorly equipped to address issues that are simultaneously (A) Urgent, and (B) Not Interesting. If we were facing a global crisis over the morality of cloning, we would be all over that. If the world were in chaos due to widespread disjunction of sign and signifier France alone would be super-addressing it effectively five times a week. But racism and the apathy of the horrible rich? Didn’t we do this? These are not problems to be solved by transforming canvas, clay or camera into a dissecting table of the soul. These are problems to be solved with volunteering and throwing money and yelling the same things over and over at the same people over and over, or, at best, by giving up on art in galleries and making a TV show.

The current situation is equally exasperating for everyone involved. Those hoping for real and positive change would like to think art could help. People making little things and pictures and videos would like to think that when they connect to what fascinates them that this act is as vital as it feels. But what’s vital when your house is on fire?

All those atrocities in my opening paragraph are offensive because they fail to respect—and so can casually discard—the private universe that is each human being. Years, children, lives; these can’t be replaced. Our solidarity—our similarities and our public selves—may save us, but our uniqueness—our differences and our privacy—is what we are saving.