Perhaps Only God's Artists Can Save Us Now

AL JAZEERA
By Santiago Zabala

Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica' is an example of art used to express reactions to significant issues [GALLO/GETTY]

Perhaps rather than God, as Martin Heidegger once said, it is art that can save us. After all, artistic creations have always had political, religious and social meanings that also aimed in some way to save us. Certainly, they also express beauty, but this depends very much on the public's aesthetic taste, which varies according to the cultural environment of each society. Pablo Picasso's Guernica is the example we all have in mind: painted as a response to the Spanish nationalist forces' bombing of a town in the Basque country, it was used not only to inform the public but also as a symbol of all the innocent victims of war. [link]