When Creation Becomes Infinite
If art is something that can be created in an instant and requires no skill, talent, or training to do so, then what does the meaning of artist become? Does it become null or unnecessary? A relic of the past?
I think the answer lies in taste.
Just because something can be created does not mean that it is good. Both in physical artistry and craftsmanship and in the digital realm, what is created can be terribly tasteless. In a world of fast fashion—clothes made with little thought, then tossed as plastic trash into the ocean—design suddenly becomes the standout.
Perhaps we have confused the difficulty of making something with the value of having made it. Skill has always mattered, and craftsmanship still matters, but technical difficulty has never been the sole measure of art. A perfectly rendered painting can be soulless. A few lines scratched onto paper can change the way someone sees the world. The tool has never been the entire point.
The strange problem of our time is not scarcity, but abundance. We can make more images than we could ever look at, hear more music than we could ever listen to, buy more clothes than we could ever wear, and consume more ideas than we could ever meaningfully consider.
When everything is available, selection itself becomes an act of creation. What we choose to keep, what we return to, what we allow into our homes and minds matters enormously.
And since art, whether it be photography, paintings, clothing, or anything else, is consumed with a flick and a swipe instead of poring over it in a gallery or on a wall, we must ask ourselves what to make of this endless, consuming impermanence.
What becomes of our minds and our future when all we have is this moment? This moment to feel beauty. This moment to feel awe. This moment to bask in the effort of creation. This fleeting moment to feel anything at all in the doldrum of the mundane that can become a whole life?
Maybe the rarest thing an artwork can receive now is not money or praise, but attention. To look at something for longer than it takes to decide whether we like it. To let an image remain unresolved. To read the poem twice. To stand in front of a painting without immediately reaching for another sensation.
Taste, then, is not knowing which trend is important or which painter one is supposed to admire. It is discernment. It is the ability to recognize when something has integrity. To know when something feels considered rather than merely produced. It is noticing proportion, restraint, tension, humor, sincerity, beauty. And perhaps most importantly, it is knowing what to pass by.
But taste is not something we are simply born possessing. A palate is refined through exposure. You see more. You read more. You listen more carefully. You learn history. You notice what lasts. Slowly, you become harder to impress but easier to genuinely move.
I believe beauty is what connects us to the infinite. Not because everything beautiful is sacred, but because beauty interrupts utility. For a moment, nothing is being optimized or solved. We are simply arrested by something. A landscape. A face. A piece of music. A room. A sentence.
Beauty reminds us of something more than simply surviving. It gives us scope when our worlds seem small. It reminds us that being alive cannot be reduced entirely to function. And so the question of art becomes not “how was it created?” but “does it make me feel something?”
Taste now becomes not something elitist, but the ability to remain sensitive in a world that will render you numb. To have the personal willpower not to become a glutton of the uncurated, but to keep your palate refined for the exquisite.
Perhaps that is what the artist becomes now, too. Not merely the person capable of making something, but the person capable of seeing. The person who knows what to choose, what to leave out, what deserves attention, and what is worth asking another human being to feel.
When creation is infinite, discernment becomes sacred.