It’s a fair question. Am I a materialist?
The short answer is: not entirely. Let me explain.
What is materialism?
Materialism is the philosophical belief that everything that exists is made of matter or is dependent on matter. In its strictest form, materialism holds that all phenomena, including thought, emotion, consciousness, and meaning, can ultimately be explained by physical processes.
In a broader cultural sense, materialism also refers to a preoccupation with possessions, wealth, and physical comfort—placing value in what can be bought, owned, or consumed.
Artists have always had an uneasy relationship with materialism. On the surface, we traffic in matter like paint, paper, words, chemicals, and light. But the real work is elsewhere: summoning the invisible from the visible. Artists extract significance from the emptiness of space. That’s what intrigues me.
Ernest Becker argued that artists reject the dominant immortality projects; money, power, even reason itself, and try to build their own. Not through denial, but through confrontation. That’s the artist’s burden: to create meaning in a world that offers none by default. I think of Camus and Sarte, absurdism and freedom.
Terror Management Theory reinforces this. It shows that creativity can buffer death anxiety, not by distracting us, but by engaging us. Artists externalize their fears, longings, and losses into form. The canvas, the print, the poem, they become stand-ins for the self, for the soul (if you will), for something that might outlast the body. But unlike materialists who seek legacy in status or statistics, the artist chases authenticity, not applause. Depth, not utility.
In that sense, art is rebellion. It refuses to reduce human life to atoms and algorithms. It insists there’s more. Not in a supernatural sense, but in a felt one. A self-made meaning. A soulful trace.
That’s why the existential artist is dangerous in a materialist culture. We don’t offer escape. We offer exposure. We remind people that they can’t reason or spend their way out of death. They have to face it. Feel it. Maybe even make something out of it.