The Prophet

Abstract

In 2009, artist Enrique Martínez Celaya sounded a clarion call to artists in the lecture “The Prophet” to make work that aspires to more than entertainment, decoration, or activism. Years later, the situation is just as urgent and his argument just as timely. “What the age needs,” Martínez Celaya argues, “is a prophet” who is responsible to the world, who searches for what he calls “a whisper of the order of things,” who affirms the complexity and mystery of life and searches for understanding, clarity, even truth, which Martínez Celaya believes is the distinctive role and responsibility of art. Drawing on Pushkin's poem “The Prophet” (1826) and Kahil Gibran's book The Prophet (1923), Martínez Celaya explains that the prophet is no martyr or mystic who seeks transcendence from this world, a hero who triumphs over the world, or a saint who inspires through certainty, but one who turns humbly and curiously toward the world. For him, the artist-prophet's work is a search for “a whisper of the order of things” that lies just below the surface of appearances. Although his artist-prophet might be unattainable, Martínez Celaya offers an inspiring and hopeful declaration of faith in the practice of art through clarity of purpose, character, urgency, and desperation in an otherwise cynical and superficial culture.