Excerpts from https://eastofborneo.org/articles/into-the-sun-of-sadness/:

“Dean’s essay is titled “And he fell into the sea,” and begins with an epigraph about Icarus, yet another tale of the seduction and glory of failure: had his wings held, had he touched the sun, we would remember Icarus not as the fool who drowned but as the fool who burned alive.

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While thousands of climate refugees crowd into unworthy boats and rafts, collectors ply the Mediterranean in their yachts, like the one decorated in razzle dazzle pop art camo by Jeff Koons for Cypriot industrialist Dakis Joannou. The ship’s name, painted across its transom, is Guilty.

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“We’re often told that art can’t really change anything,” writes British author Olivia Laing in the introduction to her collected writings, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, published in May 2020. “But I think it can.” And how? “It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living. Don’t you want it, to be impregnate with all that light? And what will happen if you are?”

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In a column on the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Laing writes of Turner painting a burning building, “Set it down: as spectacle and artefact, as testimony, witness report and permanent record. The sky is rose-pink, rose-yellow patched with blue; the sky is very lovely, full of small gold darts of burning debris. Here’s the first challenge: how not to aestheticize tragedy.” …Don’t romanticize doom; don’t treat an ashen sky like a Rothko. But don’t look away, either.

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In her first Frieze column, from December 2015, she compares another work of his, a self-portrait with his lips sewn shut, to journalistic photos of migrants on hunger strike who sewed their mouths closed as a protest against the inhumane conditions of detention camps. Perhaps, as she writes, images can speak for the voiceless: “You make a migrant image, an image that can travel where you cannot.”