IME, language and number – we don’t know how to function without them. Unless we transcend them via a spiritual practice or psychedelics, or escape into madness or dementia? Yet time, language and number combine to expedite the running of an increasingly monitored, medial, monetised society.

Time, language and number, used by managers and bureaucrats, serve to control and oppress. Yet they can empower us too. Time framed as history can predict future trends; language delights with literature, lyrics and puzzles; numbers inform and explain complex structures. Yet each of these symbolic systems, followed through to its logical end point, replaces every last trace of direct experience with simulation. Virtuality. Infinite nullity. Which is where the masters of civilisation (tech bros, multibillionaire geeks like Gates and Musk, the Davos clique) want to take us with their wet dreams of AI, ed/med/ag-tech, the metaverse etc.

How to defy this instrumental program that spells enslavement, slow death in fast-growing 15-minute cities, conversion to the emergent faith of safetyism? Art holds possibilities. Radical creativity. Trading the treadmill for more playtime. Spreading our linguistic wings instead of herding hamstrung words down mindless lines of minimal meaning. And numbers unwind into rhythm, the beat of music and dance, poetic metre.

The other day, my partner and I viewed some pseudo art while a pseudo DJ mixed pseudo music and a crowd of try-hards mingled in the choked space. Seems anyone can make art now, if that’s what they choose to call it. (Just like you can reinvent your gender identity.) Democratisation of art… Ideal? Or ideology? Because quality tends to belie equality. Yes, quality (produced by tall poppies) tends to drop a few notches when equality turns grass into lawn. But that’s the price of progress. Downloading an app so you can see a catalogue and gape at how much money pseudo artists want for their creations. My partner and I escaped asap. Still, who are we to begrudge anyone their fifteen seconds in the sun with AI poised to render most, if not all, handmade art redundant?

According to anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan, a learned and articulate critic of modernity, art originally arose in response to social anxiety. (Note the recent explosion of wannabes across all creative media.) Last year I dived deep into Zerzan’s work. When I first read it a decade ago, his antisocial cant sounded batshit (if relatively sane compared to the masses deranged by device dependence; ‘mad’ can mean too sensitive/honest/conscientious or dissident). But after spending nine years reading a far more civilised thinker, post-Jungian psychologist Wolfgang Giegerich, I needed an antidote. So, what’s Giegerich’s slant?

Take an artist inspired by trees. A painter might produce hundreds of drawings and oils of their subject; an author might write a novel, like The Overstory by Richard Powers, that sells many thousands of hard copies. They aim to awaken us to the sacred or sentient nature of trees. Giegerich calls that semantics: what you think your creation means. Yet how many trees get axed to supply the paper and stretchers artists need, never mind all the forests pulped and bound for insatiable readers? Giegerich calls that syntax: the objective meaning of art (resource-chomping products geared for consumption). Seems that not all trees are equal. Countless ‘sustainable’ monocultures of anonymous timber must fall to feed bourgeois longings for echoes of a lost Eden. Read too much Giegerich and everyone starts to sound insincere, deluded or naive.

Not that you need Giegerich to unmask the face of modernity. Satirist CJ Hopkins employs less arcane terminology. What he sums up as GloboCap (like a hat to be donned or doffed?) is Giegerich’s ‘movement of the soul’ (a cosmic process beyond our control?). And so Giegerich would have us submit, while Hopkins, like Zerzan, urges revolt.

Erudite elites can afford to acquiesce within the walls of patriarchal privilege. The rest of us must resist or kiss our freedom, such as it is, goodbye. Is art as culture part of the problem or can it be subversive? Depends. It’s not what you depict or why, but what it does that signifies. Syntax is a grammatical term, and the grammar of our world is constant circulation of money. Semantics is the fantasy that art means what we say it does. How to defy this? Good luck. Refuse to create for commercial purposes and few (if any) will value your work. Talent pales beside the holy grail of popularity (which flows from self-promotion, networking, social status etc.).

Nature produces art for free every day, and what do we do? Destroy it, or seek to evoke it using old or newfangled tools, or prompt AI to image it for us. What was the purpose of the earliest art our species made? We can’t be sure. But cave paintings aren’t portable nor saleable. Giegerich’s approach to art is purely theoretical; Zerzan sees it as compensation for lost immediacy; consolation. True enough: it consoled me. Ostracised at high school, I withdrew. And drew, and drew. Until everyone knew me as the artist. I’d killed two birds with one stone – found both refuge and identity. That was before I thought about gender.

Asks author Rachel Cusk: ‘Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?’ She contrasts the stories of underrated artist Celia Paul, a long-term lover of artist Lucian Freud (grandson of Sigmund), and the far more successful Cecily Brown, illegitimate daughter of Brit art critic David Sylvester. Cusk recounts how 55-year-old Freud, famed painter of the grotesque, seduced the hesitant 18-year-old Paul, a gifted if cloistered bishop’s daughter, who became his muse and duly bore one of his illegitimate sons. Instructive seduction is a time-honoured custom. A recent exhibition of Baroque art featured Artemisia Gentileschi’s Lucretia: a work that no doubt owes some of its power to the fact that, at 18, Gentileschi was raped by her tutor; a lawsuit, public scrutiny and her literal torture in court ensued.

And sexism persists in the art world today, entrenched in its patriarchal discourse. Take an image I found on social media: a portrait of ‘a young girl’ painted by a once renowned artist who had ‘the ability to imbue his figures with a refined awareness and a [sic] unequivocal timelessness’. What horseshit: to imagine these ‘figures’ – women paid a pittance to sit still for hours – as blank slates awaiting the artist’s act of creation, rather than deep and complex individuals. The ‘girl’ in that portrait was me at 18: my ‘refined awareness’ inspired that painter (and bridged a 23-year age gap during our affair).

Should art be political? The Left seems to think so, stretching its definition and devaluing beauty. Ditto the Right, if less literally, via classist prohibitions. Yet art on all sides has been subsumed by capitalism. It’s powerless to start a revolution. Art today is first and last a commodity in a vast market. But why put your soul into your art if the cost of living compels you to sell it? (Unless you’ve already sold your soul in pursuit of success.) Or can an artist find a tenable compromise? Some of the best work in art-show catalogues is marked NFS.