Which is mightier the pen the brush or the spoken word?
Which is mightier the pen the brush or the spoken word?
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
February 21, 2026
Comparative table of the pen brush and spoken word — key attributes
| Attribute | Pen | Brush | Spoken Word |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| Reach | Print; literate publics; archival | Visual audiences; galleries; public spaces | Immediate; crowds; viral potential |
| Immediacy | Slow; deliberative | Variable; can be instant or labored | Instantaneous; ephemeral |
| Permanence | High; texts endure in libraries | Medium to high; objects can be conserved | Low physical permanence; high memetic persistence |
| Sensory impact | Intellectual; imagistic via description | Visual and tactile | Auditory; performative; bodily |
| Political potency | Argumentative; legalistic | Symbolic; iconographic | Confrontational; mobilizing |
| Accessibility | Requires literacy; translation possible | Requires viewing context; reproducible | Low barrier; oral cultures; street-ready |
| Risk under censorship | Prosecutions via libel, sedition | Confiscation, censorship of exhibitions | Arrests, dispersal, immediate suppression |
---
Which is mightier the pen the brush or the spoken word
Isn’t it deliciously modern to ask whether the pen, the brush, or the spoken word is mightier — as if power were a neatly labeled utensil in a café of ideas? Must we choose a champion, or can we imagine a three‑headed hydra that writes, paints, and shouts in chorus? The question itself is rhetorical, theatrical, and slightly rude: it presumes that power is a zero‑sum game and that art is a duel rather than a conversation. Yet the duel is precisely where contemporary Philippine art often stages its most revealing acts: in the gallery, on the street, in the courtroom of public opinion. Contemporary Filipino artists have long mixed media and modes to espouse ideas, and in doing so they teach us that might is not a single muscle but a choreography.
Consider the pen: the slow, legal, and literate instrument. The pen writes manifestos, essays, and manifestos disguised as essays. It drafts policy critiques, composes elegies, and annotates the margins of history. In the Philippines, the written word has been both a sword and a shield: newspapers and pamphlets have toppled reputations and rallied movements; novels have excavated colonial wounds and named the names of complicity. The pen’s strength is its ability to argue, to nuance, to be quoted in perpetuity. But is nuance always persuasive? When the state moves fast and the crowd moves faster, nuance can feel like a polite cough in a thunderstorm. The pen archives; it persuades the patient; it is the slow burn that becomes the textbook.
Now the brush: pigment as provocation. Paintings, installations, and visual performances can make the invisible visible — corruption rendered in color, memory smeared across canvas, identity stitched into collage. Philippine contemporary art has a long lineage of painters and multimedia artists who translate social grief into form, who turn private trauma into public iconography. The brush can be a map and a mirror; it can be hung in a museum or pasted on a wall. Its potency lies in the way it bypasses argument and goes straight for the senses: color persuades before language can catch up. Yet the brush is also curatorial: it depends on context, on the gallery’s gatekeepers, on the critic’s vocabulary. A painting that screams in a barrio might whisper in a white cube.
And the spoken word: the voice that refuses to be archived, the shout that becomes a chant. Spoken word is the street’s lingua franca; it is the tour guide who becomes a protester; it is the performer who turns a cathedral into a stage. When a person stands and speaks — whether in a lecture hall, a plaza, or a cathedral aisle — the effect is immediate and communal. The spoken word can be illegal, intimate, and incendiary all at once. Carlos Celdran’s “Damaso” protest — a theatrical interruption in a sacred space to denounce clerical interference in public policy — is a case in point: the performance was a tour, a lecture, and a political act rolled into one, and it forced a national conversation precisely because it was spoken and staged. The spoken word’s danger is its ephemerality: it can be arrested, silenced, or misremembered; yet its memory can also be contagious.
---
The tour guide who became a provocation
Imagine a guide in Intramuros who knows the city’s bones better than its living inhabitants. He narrates, he jokes, he sings, and then — mid‑tour — he holds up a placard and reads a line that the cathedral would rather forget. Did he wield the pen, the brush, or the spoken word? He used all three: the script of his tour (pen), the staging and visuality of his interruption (brush), and the live address that made the crowd gasp (spoken word). The anecdote is not merely charming; it is instructive. It shows how contemporary art in the Philippines often refuses to be categorized by medium. Performance art, in particular, is a hybrid species: it borrows the pen’s argument, the brush’s image, and the spoken word’s immediacy to create a compound effect that is more than the sum of its parts.
---
Why the question is deliciously wrong
Isn’t it quaint to imagine that the brush sits in a studio, the pen in a study, and the spoken word on a street corner, each waiting for its turn at the podium? Contemporary practice laughs at such tidy separations. Artists mix media like cocktails; they write manifestos, paint murals, and perform in malls. The satirical truth is that the question “which is mightier” presumes a duel in which only one weapon can be drawn. But art is not a duel; it is a potluck. The brush brings color, the pen brings a recipe, and the spoken word brings the gossip that makes everyone taste the stew. If might were measured in decibels, the spoken word might win; if in archival citations, the pen; if in visceral shock, the brush. But might measured in social change? That is a composite index, and it is messy.
---
Rhetorical questions as a device Isn’t every protest a poem and every poem a protest
Who decides what counts as art and what counts as argument? When a mural is painted over by a city ordinance, was the brush punished or the idea? When a writer is sued for libel, was the pen silenced or the truth? When a performer is arrested for disturbing the peace, was the spoken word muzzled or the public conscience awakened? Rhetorical questions are not lazy; they are the artist’s scalpel. They cut through the pretense that art is decorative and reveal its civic muscle. Contemporary Philippine art uses rhetorical devices not merely to ornament but to mobilize. The question is not whether the pen, brush, or voice is mightier; it is whether the artist can make the public feel the question in their bones.
---
Beyond the Philippines A global chorus of utensils
If we step beyond the archipelago, we find the same hybrid logic. Think of murals in Latin America that turned into maps of resistance, or spoken‑word movements that became global hashtags. The brush paints a borderless iconography; the pen drafts transnational manifestos; the spoken word travels on the wings of social media. Contemporary art globally has learned to be promiscuous with media. The Filipino case is not exceptional in its hybridity; it is exemplary in its willingness to stage the hybrid in public spaces where the stakes are high and the audience is not only the elite but the neighbor, the commuter, the child.
---
Humor and esotericism The secret handshake of the avant garde
Why do artists love esoteric gestures? Because they are a secret handshake that invites the curious and excludes the complacent. Humor is the lubricant: a joke disarms, a pun distracts, and then the idea slips in like a pickpocket. Satire is the artist’s scalpel; it exposes hypocrisy with a smile. In the Philippines, satire has a long tradition — from the novelists who lampooned colonial clerics to the performance artists who mock contemporary power. The esoteric flourish is not elitist when it is paired with humor; it becomes a Trojan horse. The brush paints a caricature, the pen writes the caption, and the spoken word delivers the punchline. Who can resist laughing and then thinking?
---
Practical potency How ideas travel and take root
If we measure potency by how ideas travel, the spoken word is a sprinter, the brush a courier, and the pen a slow freight train. Spoken word can ignite a crowd and create a viral moment; the brush can create an image that circulates and becomes an emblem; the pen can produce the argument that survives the moment and becomes doctrine. The most effective political art often uses all three: a viral performance that produces an image that is then argued about in essays and policy papers. The lifecycle of an idea in contemporary art is therefore multi‑modal: perform, image, text, repeat.
---
Conclusion A final rhetorical flourish
So which is mightier — the pen, the brush, or the spoken word? Is the question itself not a little provincial, like asking whether the sun is more useful as a lamp or a heater? Might is not a property of a tool but of the strategy that wields it. The pen writes the history that the brush illustrates and the spoken word animates. The most potent acts of contemporary Philippine art are those that refuse to be monogamous: they write, they paint, they shout, and in the process they make the public uncomfortable enough to change. If you insist on a winner, I will answer with another question: which would you rather have — a manifesto that no one reads, a painting that no one sees, or a speech that no one remembers? The wise artist will hand you all three and ask you to do the rest.
---
Quick guide for readers
- If you want immediate mobilization choose the spoken word.
- If you want sensory shock and emblematic power choose the brush.
- If you want durable argument and archival weight choose the pen.
Or, better yet, choose all three and stage a small revolution.
---
If you like my any of my concept research, writing explorations, art works and/or simple writings please support me by sending me a coffee treat at my paypal amielgeraldroldan.paypal.me or GXI 09163112211. Much appreciate and thank you in advance.
Just featured at https://www.pressenza.com/2026/01/the-asian-cultural-council-global-alumni-network-amiel-gerald-a-roldan/
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ curatorial writing practice exemplifies this path: transforming grief into infrastructure, evidence into agency, and memory into resistance. As the Philippines enters a new economic decade, such work is not peripheral—it is foundational.
I'm trying to complement my writings with helpful inputs from AI through writing. Bear with me as I am treating this blog as repositories and drafts.
Please comment and tag if you like my compilations visit www.amielroldan.blogspot.com or www.amielroldan.wordpress.com
and comments at
amiel_roldan@outlook.com
amielgeraldroldan@gmail.com
A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
Recent show at ILOMOCA
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/16qUTDdEMD
https://www.linkedin.com/safety/go?messageThreadUrn=urn%3Ali%3AmessageThreadUrn%3A&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pressenza.com%2F2025%2F05%2Fcultural-workers-not-creative-ilomoca-may-16-2025%2F&trk=flagship-messaging-android
https://alumni.asianculturalcouncil.org/?fbclid=IwdGRjcAPlR6NjbGNrA-VG_2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHoy6hXUptbaQi5LdFAHcNWqhwblxYv_wRDZyf06-O7Yjv73hEGOOlphX0cPZ_aem_sK6989WBcpBEFLsQqr0kdg
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ started Independent Curatorial Manila™ as a nonprofit philantrophy while working for institutions simultaneosly early on.
The Independent Curatorial Manila™ or ICM™ is a curatorial services and guide for emerging artists in the Philippines. It is an independent/ voluntary services entity and aims to remains so. Selection is through proposal and a prerogative temporarily. Contact above for inquiries.
Comments