the unsettling trajectory of art

Let me start with a question for you readers to ponder about

when you were younger, as young as you remember how had you imagined the world around you to be like at the age you are right now?

For me, the answer would be… uh, well, it’s quite complex, so sit and bear it with me.

When I was younger, I loved to look around the world and analyze it with a philosophical lens as much as that inexperienced and innocent mind could. I thought we humans were evolving in ways that we shouldn’t; we were compromising our essence for comfort and commodifying basic survival necessities just for the sake of progress. I somehow believed that the world in the far future would stop doing whatever it was doing, and once all of us trade minimal ideas of living for capitalism, all of our problems would vanish in the face of the earth. The future of the world around me that I had imagined was that somehow we would choose to halt the concept of evolution, transforming us into some innocent, beautiful creatures constantly chasing the art around us without anything involved in between.
Well, and after that, I grew.
My ideas evolved, the lenses through which I saw the world evolved, and art evolved. But still, I enjoyed art. Art as we know it. I looked into how people defined art. The word art comes from the Latin word “ars,” meaning skill, craft, or technique, which was used as early as the 13th century, and ever since then, art has always been associated with craftsmanship, skills, creativity, and beauty. But once, when I was a naive kid without much knowledge and experience of people, I used to consider nature as an art which is still a debate among people. I grew and got more passionate about knowing art, finding art, enjoying art, and possibly in the future creating art.
With such passion inevitably came hurdles and questions I had to answer before I even proceeded into doing what my inner child always wanted to.
“Where will this passion of loving nothing take you?” So I stood and held my ground and screamed, but screamed only of course inside my head and said, “I will go where art takes me.” After I said that, I wanted to figure out where exactly art would take me in the future because it seems like the greed of certainty has consumed me, too.


Days went by, maybe even years. And it seems like art doesn’t take you anywhere. It just makes you sit with whatever is there. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but hear me out. Let’s take another word similar to art from the English dictionary, ‘technology’. Technology, as we know it, is bound to destroy itself with progress. There is a limit to where it can reach. For instance, say technology evolves to the point where it just doesn’t align with the definition of technology; it morphs into something else that we might not be able to comprehend right now. But can the same be said for the word “art”?
At what point do we stop and say the creativity and the beauty around us isn’t art anymore? A painting made by a robot isn’t that art? A beautifully designed product made only to sell more products isn’t that art? In today’s world, we claim AI art, NFTs, mass-produced wall prints, and even social media content as art. So, regardless of the intent behind the creation, art always remains art as long as it speaks to us as art.
But my point here is that I know that art ceases to exist somewhere in the far, far future because it began to exist at some point in time. But when? Where is this trajectory of art going?

I drew a conclusion amid this chaos inside my head, and to satisfy my greed for certainty, I told myself that maybe art can’t die, but our ability to recognize it as art dies. And that will be the death of art. This unsettling trajectory of art was never and has never been about art, but an unsettling trajectory of our minds and our lenses to view it — and the day we stop recognizing beauty will be the day art truly dies. So, look around while you are there. Don’t ask too many questions for reasons that define you today, but instead sit and enjoy this incomprehensible beauty that is around and maybe even within you.