2025 Must Create Its Own Art

 Tonight’s art becomes inadequate
and useless when the sun rises in
the morning. The mistake lies not in creating art for tonight, but in assuming tonight’s answers will serve tomorrow’s questions. Louise Bourgeois, a French American artist, reflected, “art is a guaranty of sanity;” but that guarantee must be renewed with each dawn, each cultural shift, and
each evolution of human consciousness. If some art endures through generations, it
is only because of its capacity to speak, its ability to demand fresh interpretations that test and challenge the new. To guarantee sanity in the coming year, 2025 must create
its own art. Why create art? Why watch art? Why read literature? True art, in the words of Sunil P Ilayidam, shakes that which is rigid and unchangeable. Art serves as humanity’s persistent earthquake, destabilising comfortable certainties and creating space
for new ways of seeing, thinking, and being
in the world. An artist’s duty is to reflect the times, and we see this in works like Picasso’s “Guernica,” which shattered comfortable illusions about the glory of war, forcing viewers to confront its brutal reality. We are limited by culture, philosophy, ethnicity,
value system, religion, and family. In each case, art serves as what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called “the hammer of the gods,” breaking apart ossified structures of thought and feeling to make room for new possibilities.

Incidentally, 2024 was the 150th anniversary of Impressionism. In 1874, 30 artists, including Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, staged the first Impressionism exhibition. They broke away from the academic traditions, and embraced modernity with all its vulnerabilities
and humanness. They moved away from subjects like, glorified history, hyped religion and myth; instead focused on the fleeting moments of everyday existence; executed art with short, broken, and bold brushstrokes, used unblended colours,
and articulated with the transient
beauty of the sunlight. Art was not static and composed from a fixed perspective anymore—art moved. The Impressionists were questioned, ridiculed, and rejected
as ‘unfinished, vulgar, lacking structure, subversive’ by the existing salons ruled by established academy artists and sponsored by the government. Impressionism art movement survived, more people began
to frequent the galleries of impressionists than the traditional official salons; and eventually has become one of the most influential art movements in history— thus was the birth of modern art.

What was modern art declaring?
In the opinion of Arnold Hauser, the author of The Social History of Art, it tried to say that truth and realities as we have known is trembling from its foundations. In the second half of the 19th century, in Capital, Karl Marx says, ‘all that is solid melts into air’. What we thought as eternal will succumb to decay. TS Eliot borrows a nursery rhyme to say on a serious note in his The Waste Land, ‘The London Bridge is falling down’. However big or stable something would seem, in the words of WB Yeats, ‘things fall apart’. Modernism eventually becomes postmodernism with its watchword, relativism. Nothing is permanent, everything is changing; and even what you see at this fleeting moment exists in relation to culture, society, and historical context; and not absolute.

Jesus Washing the Feet of a Woman Disciple, by Jyoti Sahi. Even now the Church can’t fully accept the fact that Jesus would have washed the feet of women. And the men around in the picture, whom the artist calls as navarasas (different moods and passions), are ill treating, mocking, and questioning both Jesus and the woman—one is spiting, another is hitting, one is hiding his face in shame, and so on. No church wanted this picture; they can’t comprehend how it is Christian.

People are afraid of serious art, for it speaks to their ultimate depths. While visiting the art ashram of Jyoti Sahi, he extensively engaged me with stories, narratives, and meaning of numerous works of art. As we moved from one painting to another we came across a painting portraying Jesus washing the feet of a woman disciple. Jyoti Sahi almost moved on, not wanting to say much about it; but commented that nobody would want such art in their chapels or churches; for it would constantly challenge patriarchy and colonial religion.

Art in 2025 must challenge majoritarian and religious fundamentalism, Hindutva nationalism, fascism, crony capitalism, erosion of democracy, environmental and climate change, gender inequality, caste discrimination, and, on a personal front, mental illness.

Creating art looks foolish to the nationalist, capitalist, patriarchal society— it is a very dangerous game. It is like discussing colour with someone who is colour-blind. It is a real challenge; more and more in most conservative and rigid businesses and establishments people do not encourage art, lest they be challenged and forced to change. People are afraid of art, because real art brings the question and the answer into your house.