Art for Our Sakes
June 4, 2026 at 08:18PMArt’s distance “from the prerogatives of the powerful,” writes Zadie Smith, “is precisely where its force of resistance lives.” Smith considers the value of making art during a time of atrocities, looking to E.M. Forster, Macbeth, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World for guidance. Her essay is a searing case for the damages done to humanity when power tries to subject everything to notions of “progress” and “convenience.”
The odds of making a piece of art that truly matters never really improve. And while we can certainly interpret Jones’s portrait of black people as a progressive leap forward from Shakespeare’s portrait of Othello, the gap between Macbeth and The Known World is still quite unlike the one between washing your clothes by hand in a stream and using a washing machine. The process of reading them both will require, from you, much the same human faculties. You’ll have to imagine, think, and engage with a make-believe world, created by a stranger. An analogy for this is love. Is the love I feel for my children an advance upon or a devolution from the love a fourteenth-century woman felt for hers? Not all human experiences are subject to progress.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/06/04/zadie-smith-art-violence/
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