Why Art Needs Less Fear and More Vision

Art is not meant to reassure. It is not here to please, to follow, or to obey. Art is an act of defiance, a rupture in the ordinary, a gaze that does not avert itself. Yet today, so much of what surrounds us in contemporary culture is marked by hesitation—by the fear of misstep, of not being understood, of not being accepted. Vision is sacrificed at the altar of safety. We must ask: When did we start fearing the very essence of what art is meant to be?

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Rick Rubin once said, “The best art divides the audience.” And yet, we live in an era where division is often mistaken for failure. To create with vision means to risk, to provoke, to expose raw nerve endings. Look at the painters of our time—Adrian Ghenie excavating history’s wounds through violent, blurred textures; Julie Mehretu mapping the chaos of modern existence in frenetic, layered lines. Their work does not whisper. It does not apologize. It stands.

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Music, too, has its revolutionaries. Ryuichi Sakamoto, in his last years, stripped everything down to its purest form—melancholy reduced to single notes, silence as important as sound. Arca, on the other end of the spectrum, fractures electronic composition into something alien, unsettling, utterly new. These artists understand: art is not about comfort. It is about truth.

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In The Art of Forgery, Noah Charney writes, “All art is either revolution or plagiarism.” A brutal truth, but an essential one. The fear of stepping into the unknown has created a culture of self-replication, of safe gestures disguised as boldness. But vision does not ask for permission. It does not seek to be ‘liked.’ Look at the radicals—Ai Weiwei, unflinching in his dialogue with power; Tetsuya Ishida, painting the grotesque machinery of modern life with eerie precision. They see beyond the immediate, beyond the dictated language of the present.

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Famed Chinese curator Hou Hanru speaks of artists as “catalysts of the unknown.” The unknown is where art belongs. Mayakovsky knew this when he thundered against convention, when he wrote, “Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.” Lev Dodin, in his theater, speaks of art as a matter of necessity, not entertainment. This is the essence we risk losing when we create for approval instead of creation itself.