When did art stop being something we lean into and become something we skim? When did listening to music turn into skipping through it? When did songs stop being journeys and start being hooks engineered for fifteen seconds of attention?

These questions have been circling my mind since I wrote a piece about fashion at the end of last month, which is about how we dress for the camera now, how our sense of style is shaped by the need to be seen, how outfits are curated not for their emotional truth, but for their photogenic utility. (Much more is being explored in “Why Did We Make It Content?” which can be read here.) At the time, it felt like an isolated observation. I thought I was only talking about clothes. But when I opened that essay again a few days ago, a thread began to unravel, one that wasn’t about fashion anymore. It was about everything.

Because once you notice it in one place, you start to see it everywhere. What happened to fashion, how it surrendered to the feed, how it became something to be captured rather than lived, is only a micro-version of what happened to the entire cultural landscape. Everything has been in a slow process of transformation, turning from experience, meaning, and expression to artifact, material, and content.

It’s strange to say this because we live in a time when creation is truly abundant. More music, more images, and more writing is released in a day than ever before. It is the trend of “more”, one accelerated by AI, and also ushering in an era of unprecedented output when anyone can generate a song, an essay, or an artwork in seconds.

So here’s the obvious question: if we’re surrounded by so much creativity, how is it possible that it feels thinner? How can something be everywhere and yet feel like it’s dissolving?

My answer is that we may not actually be surrounded by creativity, but by content. And there is a subtle, yet devastating difference between the two.

Some might argue that this democratization is positive, that more voices, more access, more creation must equal cultural richness. And there’s truth in that. But there’s a difference between abundance and saturation, between expression and optimization. When everything is designed to travel quickly rather than land deeply, when everything must justify its existence in seconds, we don’t get more art. We get more of the same thing, dressed in different aesthetics.

You hear it in the way music is produced now. The intro is short because people skip, the vocals come in fast because people don’t wait, and the chorus is pushed to the front because the algorithm rewards nothing but immediacy. Songs are designed for the trend and built for the platform. They’re no longer journeys; they’re simply hooks packaged for fifteen-second attention spans.

Then I look at visual art, the one thing that was supposed to resist this speed we’ve become obsessed with. Art used to be a still point, something that forced us to slow down. We entered a room, and a painting pulled us in. We stopped. We looked. We felt. But now, that stillness is at risk. The image is swallowed by the scroll. We’re no longer arriving at a piece, but passing through it. We consume it in the same way we consume everything else: instantly and unconsciously. Even when people go to museums, the artwork is no longer the main destination; the photo of them with the artwork is. The piece becomes a background to their presence, not a presence they enter.

As someone who first started expressing themselves through writing, I had to reflect on it as well. Writing has undergone the same mutation. Thoughts have become posts, essays have become threads, and arguments have become quotes. In short, reflection has become aesthetic. It’s not that people don’t read; they do. But they read differently, looking for the line that can be shared, the sentence that looks good out of context, the idea that can travel quickly, that can capture attention. Sometimes I wonder how many things are saved and never returned to. How many articles are bookmarked for the feeling of intellectual participation rather than the experience itself? This movement is reshaping literary traditions, and if writers don’t adapt to the times, they risk disappearing. (By adapting, I don’t mean their writing has to change, but the way they are releasing it into the world.)

Photography, design, film, and every other art form carry the same wound. The wound of being repurposed, of being optimized, of being forced to exist not as full expressions of human experience but as fragments designed to survive the speed of the feed. Everything is pressured into efficiency. Everything must justify its existence in seconds. There is no more space for the slow burn, the gradual build, or the work that asks something of you.

It’s sad.

And from this sadness, a question begins to echo in my soul and mind: Are these art forms dead? Have we killed them by turning them into content?

Emotionally, it’s easy to say yes, something precious has been lost. But I don’t think death is the right word. What we’re witnessing is something that has changed so fundamentally that it feels like death. Or maybe it’s closer to a kind of spiritual dehydration, where the life is there, but the environment is harsh, and the roots struggle to find water.

Because when I look closer, I see that these forms are adapting to the times we’re living in. They’re mutating under the pressure of the platforms that host them. They’re forced to compromise, to shrink, to entertain, but at their core, they still carry the same intention they always did: to express something true, to connect something internal to the external world, and to bridge the distance between what we feel and what others can feel with us.

Maybe this is why this moment feels so culturally dissonant to me. We’re witnessing two versions of art running in parallel. There’s the version that lives for the feed (the optimized, compressed, digestible, fast one) and then there’s the version that lives for something deeper. The one that demands presence, attention, and interiority. The one that refuses to bow to speed, that still believes in resonance over reach.

And this reflection made me reach the following paradox: the more everything becomes content, the more we feel the absence of meaning, the thing that content can’t replicate. And when something becomes scarce, we begin to crave it again. It’s so inherently human.

This will become more and more visible. People will seek longer videos instead of shorter ones. They will be returning to vinyl, to books, to analog photographs, to physical spaces where attention feels undivided. They will be tired of art being treated like content. They will be exhausted by seeing everything flattened into the same format, the same pace, the same expectation, tired of feeling like beauty is just another thing to scroll past, tired of the algorithm deciding who they should care about.

I feel this exhaustion. Many people I know do too. And it’s this exhaustion that tells me nothing is dead, not really. It tells me that art is still alive somewhere beneath all this noise. It tells me that meaning is still possible, even if it requires effort. The hunger for depth hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been starved.

And if something can be starved, it can also be fed. If something can be forgotten, it can also be remembered. Culture is cyclical, not linear, and every time something becomes oversaturated, its opposite begins to bloom in the background.

So no, I don’t think fashion is dead. Or music. Or art. Or writing. Or any other form of expression. But I do think we’re living in a moment where their essence is harder to access, not because the forms failed, but because the world around them changed faster than our ability to adapt.

Maybe the real crisis isn’t the death of these forms, but the crisis of our attention, patience, and presence. Maybe the answer isn’t to declare anything dead or alive, but to ask ourselves what it means to look at something without immediately turning it into content. What it means to engage with art without needing to show it. What it means to listen without skipping. What it means to see without documenting. What it means to create without calculating. What it means…

Because if we can do that, even occasionally, then none of these forms are dead. They’re just waiting for us to return to them with the kind of attention that makes them come alive again. The problem isn’t that everything became content. The problem is that we forgot how to see.

And nothing died at all. The door is still open, waiting for us to enter it.

Thank you! 🌹

Eduard 🌹

The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)