The art

“Occupation is for our life, Our Life is not for occupation”. I recently read this Quote and it resonated with me beyond anything else. Another similar Quote that I heard is that people sometimes ask, “Why art?” and the answer is, “An engineer may build huge bridges, a doctor may save thousands of lives, an accountant may build huge books, But art is what enables them to do these. Art keeps them sane through the challenges and it gives them a reason to build the world. Without art why would they even bother to do anything?”. 

There is a term in modern dictionary which is called, “enshittification”. It basically means that the way our world, very heavily affected by European and American capitalism is set up, that with time everything gets worse. The money becomes the biggest motivator for everything and things become worse automatically. 

I am seeing a slow “enshittification” of art. People used to write poetry, not to impress the world, but to tell their friends and to tell the love of their life. It felt genuine, like I am reading the insides of someone’s heart. But now… with more and more social media, there is so much more content being written everyday, but rarely anything feels as close to heart than the small poems people used to write before. And with the use of AI and LLMs, this has gotten worse. Its like I don’t know if anything is real anymore. 

More pictures are being taken and AI is making more art every week than the entire humanity has made in its lifetime, still it all just feels “fake”. It feels soulless. AI can do everything but it can not put in the feeling that we get when looking at a piece of art. Its too perfect. And I think that art is not about perfection. Art is all about imperfections. Art is the stroke of brush that did not land perfectly. Or its the sentence which is slightly wrong in grammar but very impactful in meaning. its the tune that did not come out correctly. And when we look at art that was made by humans, humans who make mistake, we wonder… “what exactly was going on in her head when she did this?”. This is what gives art its soul. 

And machines are simply incapable of doing that. they are too perfect for their own fault. They are good for making an advertisement, or making an Instagram post that aims to keep people scrolling as long as possible, but Its not able to motivate an engineer to build awesome things, or to keep a doctor from burning out.  

With our unlimited access to every piece of art of information we could ever desire, we are losing our appreciation for art. Our attention span got lower and lower and we do not appreciate art as much as we used to. Sometimes I feel nostalgic about 90s, when we did not have internet, yet information was becoming widely available, via books, magazines and libraries and CDs and VHS. Its funny cause I was not alive then but Somehow I feel nostalgic about that. 

I don’t know what’s going to happen next. no one knows. But I suspect that the best days of art may be behind us. I hope and pray that it does not happen. I hope that more and more people do art, and do what they love despite AI making everything so easy and quick. I hope people realize that Art is not commercial. Art is art and its a part of life.