Peter Anthony Cowan — Words

Progress and Stagnation in Art

Art has always moved in mysterious ways, often arriving at truths before the world is ready to receive them. Consider the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin in the 18th century, who captured light and perspective with photographic precision decades before the camera was invented. His still lifes possessed an uncanny quality. It wasn't just the realistic attention to detail, it was the flattening of perspective, and depth compression, visual techniques that wouldn't become widespread until photography emerged and taught us to see differently. How did he access this way of seeing before the technology existed to make it common?

This phenomenon repeats throughout history. Artists consistently arrive at innovations that anticipate cultural shifts, sometimes by decades. Consider the emergence of Cubism in the early 1900s, when Picasso began fragmenting reality and showing objects existing in multiple states simultaneously--during the same period that Max Planck and early quantum physicists were discovering that particles could exist in multiple states until observed. These concepts remained largely unknown outside the physics community for decades, yet artists were independently exploring the same ideas: that reality is fundamentally uncertain and fragmented, that the act of observation affects what we see, and that truth exists in probability rather than fixed form.

Similarly, composers like Schoenberg were abandoning the certainty of traditional harmonic structures, creating atonal music where melody emerged from untethered patterns within dissonant structures, while Stravinsky's rhythms suggested a universe governed by uncertainty rather than clockwork predictability. It's as if they were all accessing ideas that are somehow already "there," waiting to be discovered

One explanation for this comes from Rupert Sheldrake’s idea of morphic fieldsâ€"strange, subtle information patterns that might link living systems. An idea that I resisted when I first learned about it, but eventually embraced. Anyone who’s ever experienced one of those odd moments where you suddenly turn my head and catch someone staring at you has experienced something like it. Sheldrake takes that intuition and blows it wide open. He suggests that when someone makes a breakthrough, a kind of invisible groove gets carved into the field, making the insight easier for others to stumble into. And this phenomenon appears across species. The most famous example involves Japanese macaques who learned to wash sweet potatoes in the ocean. Once a critical number of monkeys on one island developed this behavior, monkeys on distant islands, with no physical contact, spontaneously began washing their food too. Applied to art, it hints that certain creative ideas might drift through a shared field of consciousness, waiting for people who are attuned enoughâ€"or vulnerable enoughâ€"to receive them.

Recently I fell down a rabbit hole digging the Schumann resonance and its odd overlap with our own brain rhythms. The resonance is born from lightning strikes bouncing between the Earth and the ionosphere, humming at a frequency uncannily close to our alpha waves. While digging through papers, I ran into a study by Douglas Youvan from Harvard. His argument was stranger than I expected: that our brainwaves might actually sync to this resonance, and allow it to act like a carrier wave, almost like we’re picking up a silent radio broadcast directly into our minds. Now, there is no way to prove this, but it could explain why some people feel plugged into something bigger, and experience spontaneous insights during those quiet, drifting moments when the mind loosens its grip.

with the Schumann resonance acting as a carrier wave, bringing our thoughts halfway across the world. Perhaps artists, in their heightened states of receptivity, are particularly attuned to these subtle fields of information.

Whether through morphic fields, electromagnetic resonance, or some other mechanism we don't yet understand, art has historically moved through collective leaps. Individual artists become channels for ideas that seem to emerge from a shared creative unconscious, pushing culture forward in a rapid transition, rather than a purely linear progression.

But something changed around the turn of the millennium.

Since roughly 2000â€"right as smartphones, social media, and the whole always-on atmosphere took holdâ€"progress in the arts began to stall. Music grew more homogenized, pulled toward a kind of glossy, but amorphous, pop default mode of familiarity, shaped less by authentic expression and more by algorithmic optimization. Visual art has become dominated by trends that are "Instagrammable"--visually striking and easy to remixâ€"spreading globally within days, even finding their way into galleries, echoing the aesthetics popularized by Kusama’s Infinity Rooms. Film and television kept circling the same familiar franchises, as if the collective imagination got tired and gave up. And somewhere in the middle of this drift, politics slipped into the space that artistic vision used to occupyâ€"not as true conviction, but as a something that was de rigeur; a kind of performance of values. All elements of surprise go away when art starts checking boxes. Overall, we are witnessing a great a flattening effect, where regional artistic voices are subsumed into a global monoculture

Part of this drift is economic, yes, but not in the clean, textbook way we usually describe it. The internet has squeezed everything toward the same few platforms, and those platforms reward predictability above all else. The industry learned quickly: make the thing that offends no one, that excites just enough people, that fits into the same marketing slot as last year’s success. Art built only for consumption becomes timid. And while there’s nothing wrong with entertainmentâ€"we all enjoy it sometimesâ€"the space for strange, personal, or spiritually disruptive work has thinned to almost nothing. The only "polarizing" art we see now is political performance disguised as "resistance", but that is usually conveniently aligned with whatever happens to be the current thing. Art with the capacity to surprise is even harder to come by.

But there may be deeper forces at work.

We now live surrounded by an unprecedented level of noise and disturbance. The constant buzzing of traffic, airplanes, sirens, car stereos blasting, the near constant flow of harsh, white light from LEDs and digital screens, WiFi signals, cell tower radiation, Bluetooth connections, radio waves from countless devices. These all combine to create a kind of static that overwhelms our nervous systems and certainly interferes with our ability to tune into the collective field. Often when invited to a party I arrived the house is lit like a Home Depot lighting section. I go around strategically dimming and turning off lights, and everyone relaxes. They all noticed how much more calm they are. But no one thought to do anything about it. We are so disturbed that we are not even aware of these disturbances anymore. If artists have historically accessed creative insights through some form of heightened sensitivity, the current environment could be compared to trying to hear a whisper on a factory floor.

More fundamentally, we live in what many would call a spiritual desert. Traditional sources of meaningâ€"whether we’re talking about religious institutions, community bonds, or daily connection to nature woven into our livesâ€"have weakened without being replaced by anything equally nourishing. My experience with post-modern spiritual communities has brought me in touch with a lot of people who mean well, but who do not appear to be any more connected, despite how they appear on the surface. When the soul is under-fed, when we're disconnected from sources of deep meaning, what do we have to draw from creatively? Art becomes surface-level decoration rather than soulful expression.

The internet promised to democratize creativity, and in many ways it has, but in doing so it has also commoditized it. Additionally, it has created a culture of constant comparison and instant feedback that is antithetical to the deep, meditative stillness required for meaningful art. At root, digital media is information, and it arrives on top of a culture that already prioritizes knowledge and certainty above mystery and wonder. But information is the opposite of creation, which comes from intuition. Though this space has huge commercial promise for any creator, In entering it we risk resigning to the impossibility of silenceâ€"the quiet space where artistic truths emerge, in a war of attrition with the constant distraction of digital connectivity.

Yet there are signs of awakening.

Spirituality is experiencing a renaissance outside traditional institutions. People are rediscovering ancient traditions, modern-era esoteric practices, meditation, plant medicine, and reconnection to nature, all of which offer direct access to spiritual source without institutional mediation. Mystical experiences are becoming more common and more openly discussed. Artists are beginning to speak again about inspiration as something that comes through them rather than from them, dare I say... God?

There's a growing hunger for meaning that serves something larger than commerce, for experiences that transform rather than merely entertain. People are rediscovering authentic expression, seeking depth and truth over what is likely to trend or go viral. The very stagnation we're experiencing may be creating the conditions for its own transformation, fostering a collective yearning for something more real, more alive, more connected to source.

We’re undeniably on the precipice of massive technological, cultural, and political transformation. The old system has already fallen apart, but the new one hasn’t taken shape; the pieces are scattered, and no one really knows how they’ll be assembled. Institutional authority is breaking down across multiple domains at the same time that technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, blockchain, and quantum computing are rewriting the foundations of how we create value, organize society, and even understand reality itself. I think about all this with a mix of excitement and dread. We’re in a collective liminal moment, suspended between what was and what will be, stuck in a space where old certainties have dissolved and new structures haven’t yet crystallized. It’s destabilizing, and honestly, it should be.

I believe we are on the precipice of a spiritual transformation as well. As more individuals reconnect with their spiritual side, as we begin to understand and mitigate the effects of the noise and disturbance that overwhelms our nervous systems and our connection to nature, as we learn to create islands of silence in this noisy world, perhaps the morphic field will shift.

We're entering a time when humanity can awaken not only to its interconnectedness with each other, but to the fundamental unity of all existence. The recognition that we are not separate from nature, from the cosmos, from each other. This awareness that everything is interconnected and fundamentally the sameâ€"from subatomic particles to galaxies, from individual consciousness to collective fieldsâ€"can’t help but fundamentally change how we create and what we express. The artistic innovations that emerge from this spiritually awakened humanity could easily dwarf anything we've seen in the past century.

You could look at it as if we are all participants in a collective dream, and each time someone awakens to the deeper truth, it creates a rift in the morphic field and makes awakening more accessible for others. Creativity through authentic artistic resonance will be a fundamental catalyst for this awakening. Yet this outcome is not inevitable. The same technologies reshaping our world could just as easily be used to entrench our slumber, creating ever more sophisticated forms of distraction that keep us disconnected from nature. Whether we collectively awaken or succumb to these distractions may well depend on our ability to create space for silence and peace amidst the noise. Of course, it is equally possible that most people will prefer the distraction of the noise, to the reckoning of the silence, and will choose the former.

The question remains whether art will evolve at all, or whether we'll remain trapped in cycles of stagnation. Will we be clear enough to receive what is waiting come through? Sensitive enough to tune in beyond the static of our current moment? The silence is available to us, we just need to remember how to listen.