On Art, Education, and the Current State of Everything
MARCH 3, 2025
By Nicholas Andriani
I woke up today with a question rattling in my head like a loose screw in the machinery of modern life: What does it mean to create in an era of collapsing reality?
Everywhere I turn, the fractures are widening. The things we once called truth, fact, or even just a shared reality are dissolving under the weight of proxy measurements, political theater, and the increasing mathematization of human experience. Social theories and cognitive theories try to relate constructs, but we mistake the proxies for the thing itself. We assign numerical value to concepts that resist quantification—like justice, like community, like art. But in doing so, we distort the very things we seek to understand. Value metrics and false proxies are eroding the real.
This is a crisis not just of politics but of meaning.
The Role of the Artist and Educator in an Age of Abstraction
In times of turmoil, art is a mirror, a hammer, and a bridge. It reflects our reality, it breaks the false idols, and it connects us to something deeper than ourselves. As an artist, a storyteller, a teacher—I refuse to let abstraction win.
Making something with your hands, creating from raw materials, is one of the last acts of rebellion in a world increasingly driven by simulations of value. Lynda Barry, a hero of mine, once said: “Use your digits!” Make things. Write with a pen. Scratch words into a napkin. Paint, carve, stitch, build, shout. Art, when done without expectation of scale or monetization, is an act of defiance against the illusion of value created by capital.
And as an educator, I see my role not as transmitting “marketable skills” but as teaching people how to think, how to see, how to question. In a world that increasingly wants passive consumers of pre-digested meaning, the ability to critically engage—to wrestle with ideas, to interrogate narratives, to make sense of contradictions—is more valuable than ever.
That’s why I teach. That’s why I create. That’s why I refuse to let abstraction win.
Lady Gaga, Punk Goddess (and Other Necessary Saints)
Punk is not dead. It just wears different clothes.
If you haven’t yet considered Lady Gaga a punk icon, you haven’t been paying attention. She embodies everything punk was meant to be—a force of radical self-expression, disruption, and reclamation of space. Like the best of the DIY movement, she’s a worldbuilder, creating her own mythos, her own language, her own freak sanctuary.
Punk isn’t a sound—it’s a refusal. A rejection of what’s handed to you as inevitable. It’s DIY, zines, self-publishing, small collectives, mutual aid, smashing barriers, being The Multiverse’s Best ____? (Fill in the blank).
If you’re in need of something to fuel the fire this week, I offer you this:
READ:
• The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander’s scathing exposé of mass incarceration as modern slavery.
• The New Saints – A meditation on revolutionaries, visionaries, and those who refuse to accept the world as it is.
WATCH:
• Legion – A psychedelic masterclass in fractured reality.
• Apocalypse Now – Because history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as a movie that feels more like prophecy.
LISTEN:
• Sebastian Bach – Not the 18th-century one. The screaming, shredding, unapologetic one.
• Spiritualized – For when you need space to think, to dream, to break apart and put yourself back together.
• Mammalz is Me! – Because I’m done waiting for the world to change.
• Lady Gaga – Punk Goddess. Saint of the Unruly.
DO:
• Make things with your hands. Write, draw, sculpt, sew, protest.
• Make life great again. But for real this time.
Call to Action: The Future is Built, Not Inherited
The world is an abstraction machine, and it will grind us down if we let it. But we don’t have to.
We build our own realities, our own narratives, our own ways of being. That’s what art is for. That’s what education should be for. That’s what punk has always been for.
This week, challenge the proxies. Question what is being measured and what is being left out. Ask yourself: What is the gap between theory and reality, and how do I bridge it?
And if you’re out there, reading this, wondering how to connect: Write me.
Seriously. I’m looking for Snail Mail buddies. Let’s start a letter-writing movement. Let’s make something real together.
And if you’re in Kansas City, near it, or just passing through, let’s meet. We build the world we want by making space for each other in it. Let’s make some space.
Send me a letter. Drop me a line. Let’s make something together.
Long live reality.
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