Why can’t the most advanced civilization in history create more beauty? This issue has always worried me. Yes, the demise of community cohesion is one culprit. (Why make beauty for such a blatantly materialistic, economic-centered society?) A more human-centered approach to public space would give something to all of us; AND our progeny.
Take the recent art sale of an NFT for $69 million. (Some of this artist’s NFT works sell for a reasonable $1). Our culture is rapidly abandoning real body-centered deights (beauty, good foods, nature, face-to-face relationships, etc. etc.) in favor of strange intellectual hopes (“I own something unique and you should be impressed!”) Apparently the mysterious buyer of the NFT is going to profit from splitting the digital file into many bits and selling those. Now you can buy a small piece of a unique NFT, an idea, that no one else owns!
Humans crave beauty, a critical and universal nutrient that has largely lost its conscious value. Yet our bodies insist on that value, despite all our calculations to the contrary. Someday all those vacuous hopes will collapse as the young ones see through such blatant self-importance, insisting on real body-centered values. This is of course assuming that AI––which has no such inconvenient sensuous desires–– doesn’t take over the world. Yes, the emperor has no clothes!
