Chef Massimo Bottura was stuck.

His restaurant, Osteria Francescana in Modena, was serving traditional fare and doing well, but he felt uninspired, trapped in a creative cul-de-sac. While working in New York he had met his wife, Lara, who introduced him to the world of art. Together they made it a ritual to visit galleries every weekend, a practice they continued on their return to Italy.

At the Venice Biennale they walked into a room filled with Maurizio Cattelan’s installation of lifelike pigeons perched high near the ceiling. The pigeons had left droppings down the walls and onto the other artworks. Something clicked. Bottura realised that if he wanted to make his mark, he too had to rise above tradition, take the bird’s-eye view, and even deface what had come before. The first dish he created was Six tortellini walking to the broth. Rather than a spoonful, he asked diners to pause, step back, and regard each tortellino as an individual. Locals were furious. You don’t mess with tradition. You don’t mess with Nonna. But with persistence and luck, he won them over, and then the world. Osteria Francescana is now consistently ranked among the best restaurants on the planet.

My background is in engineering. I am no scholar of art. Yet I know there are two kinds of truth: intellectual and emotional. Art gives us access to the latter. It is truth in all its subtlety and power. Frederick Douglass once said that the dead fact is nothing without the living impression. Art provides that impression. It opens the aperture of our vision, letting us glimpse sentiments that might otherwise feel foreign. It carries us to the heartbreak of the past or the promise of the future. Longinus, two thousand years ago, observed that “the effect of elevated language is not persuasion but transport”.

Consider Charles Black Jr. He was a white high-school student in the 1930s when he first heard Louis Armstrong play. He realised he was witnessing genius, genius housed in a body that his society dismissed. He was struck by the failure of his world to recognise kinship. That moment of aesthetic force altered him. Years later he joined the legal team for the 1954 Brown v Board of Education case that persuaded the US Supreme Court to declare segregation unlawful. History is full of such moments, when art has redirected lives far beyond the studio, the stage, or the gallery.

Today, as generative AI and other technologies take on more of what we call creative work, we face an even greater need to seek what is distinctly human. Original vision and bold ideas cannot be outsourced. To ascend, we must first turn inward. Art, as an aesthetic force, has the power to expand the imagination, to re-enchant the ordinary, and to remind us that being human is not about replication but about transformation.

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