In the last 30 years, geometric representation theory has produced a large stock of examples of linear 2-representations of Artin groups. These 2-representations have not really been used yet to prove genuinely new theorems about the groups themselves, but there is good reason to believe that they will eventually be useful to geometric group theorists. In the first part of this talk I will describe a simple example of a 2-representation of an Artin group, and explain how much of the classical theory of Artin groups is visible through it. In the latter part of the talk I will try to explain an approach to the K(\pi,1) conjecture which emerges from the study of spherical objects in this simple 2-representation.