Art is a reflection of human nature, he said. It is beautiful, and awful. It is simple, and it is incomprehensible. Art is the process of taking things apart to see how they work, and it is the process of breaking things to remind us how fragile they are. He sat on the edge of my couch, drinking a glass of water, and he said that we were creating an atmosphere that would retain the radiation reflecting off the surface of the earth. We were melting the edges of the ice caps, cooling down the northern seas. We were slowing the Gulf Stream, dramatically changing the way the environment behaved. He grabbed my shoulder and said, Isn’t art supposed to move you? Isn’t it supposed to shake you by the hair and say “Aren’t you afraid?”

He said art isn’t just for your benefit, or mine. Art can be a lesson that we leave behind, a horrible warning instead of a shining example. Art, he said, isn’t your little paintings and comic books. Art is the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.