Dead Art or Dead Minds?

Big, Blue $43.8 million Newman “Zip” Painting 

On the 8^th of October, a lift technician at a museum in the Netherlands mistakenly threw away a piece of artwork made to look like two empty beer cans. Last year, the infamous artwork consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall was eaten by a hungry visitor to a gallery in Seoul, South Korea. Last month, I went to an art gallery and convulsed my face in disdain at the random blobs of paint that covered the canvases on the high walls.

Modern art can be quite the sore spot for us connoisseurs. The painful abstract paintings, novels of base vocabulary, CGI drowned movies and music made on one beats app with auto-tune or nonsense lyrics physically hurt. I know I sound like your grandmother here, but bear with me when I ask you; how do you feel when you see a plain canvas covered entirely in blue paint? What emotions does a blue rectangle evoke? To me, none. But what if I told you that rectangle sold for almost $44 million? You’d probably ask why. If I asked you again what a $44 million blue rectangle made you feel, you’d probably answer nothing too. Because you don’t see the value in it. You don’t see the value in what doesn’t move you.

Proponents of modern art often argue that its value lies not just in its aesthetic appeal but in the ideas and concepts it explores since it offers commentary on contemporary life. Even when it appears simple or abstract, supporters view it as a form of intellectual exploration. This is countered by opponents arguing that modern art prioritizes intellectual concepts over aesthetic beauty or emotional resonance. This focus on ideas makes the art seem cold, impersonal, and detached from the emotions that traditionally move viewers. Which to be honest, is true. When you fail to see the vision, you fail to see the meaning.

Seeing a brown smudge of paint over a green smudge did not evoke any emotion in me. But the statue of the thinker at Alhamra holds my attention each time I go. I could not get past the first two chapters of You. But the short stories of Rabindranath Tagore give me chills. I don’t even need to explain about the movies, you get the gist.

Is it just me? Or has art really lost emotional depth and meaning? I believe it has, but with a reason. Art is always a reflection of the artist’s soul and community. Given the state of art today, we can only derive the logical conclusion that the mind and society being reflected is exactly the problem. What started off as a rejection of traditions and conventions has almost become anarchy. And it is this anarchy that reflects in the boundless creation of modern art – the chaos that we fail to understand, the chaos that we don’t like. Abstract might just be another way to say ‘no idea what’s going on here’.

The sociological concept of Culture Lag points out the gap between society’s rapid technological advancements and the slower pace of its cultural evolution. Technology has outpaced our ability in the modern day to process change; thus the culture lag it brought along with the chaos and unpredictability of our times has led to the production of art that feels hollow and disconnected from deeper meaning. Not creation with soul, but merely production to fill in the void of meaning and structure we have less of each day.

Art—once a vessel for human expression, a reflection of our shared experiences and values—has become untethered from the very culture it seeks to represent. Artists are left to grapple with shifting paradigms, creating works that mirror the confusion and dissonance of a world racing ahead of itself, where form supersedes function, and aesthetics overshadow substance.

In this lag, art is losing its anchorage to the human spirit, becoming a commodity of distraction rather than a bridge to understanding. The rituals, symbols, and stories that once connected art to the sacred or the communal have become fragmented, reduced to fleeting visuals, shallow references, and surface-level trends. The pursuit of novelty, driven by technological possibilities, has left behind the soul of creation—the slow, deliberate exploration of meaning, emotion, and identity.

As culture struggles to catch up, art born in this time of deep culture lag feels like a reflection of an ungrounded society, one where deeper truths are buried under the noise of progress, leaving us with expressions that, while visually stunning, lack the depth to move us profoundly.

But people still crave real art. It will always remain a deeply human trait to seek an outlet or a manifestation for the catharsis of our thought and emotion. So, while bland abstract pieces sell in Manhattan for millions of dollars, over 30,000 people visit the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa every single day. Someone somewhere in this hyper-industrialised world is listening to Bach. And I am sitting in my living room, still admiring the painting of her village my mother made. I long for her to paint again, I nag her. Until I realise the culture lag that befalls my own house. Mine and my mother’s creativity with a paintbrush forgotten as we discover AI tools, as we work our jobs, as we lose our soul in the abysmal survival of the fittest, the survival of the modern-est, the have-no-time-est, the who-cares-anymore-est.

I don’t know when I’ll get the time to finish my Leonard Cohen inspired tea and oranges painting and I don’t know if my mother will ever paint again. But I do know that there are more that feel the same. And I can only pray that one day when the sun is bright and the breeze soft, someone will pick up a paintbrush, a guitar, a piece of clay or a pen and create something that will give us goosebumps. Something that will remind us of our humanity and the tenderness we so intensely crave to feel again.