The question of what art is for persists with a peculiar tenacity.

 

 

 

 

 

 It returns across institutional                                   frameworks, funding structures, and critical                           discourse, as if the answer might yet be                                                                 stabilised:

 

art as social instrument, as critique, as repair, as knowledge production.

                               

 

 

                                                                         Even the defence of art’s “uselessness” remains caught within                      this economy, a negative reflection of the same demand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To ask whether art is useful or useless is already to concede too much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is to assume that use remains the structuring condition within which art must situate itself.

                                          That it must either serve, resist, withdraw, or refuse. That it must, in some form, account for its presence.

 

 

 

 

But this assumption no longer holds with the same force.

 

 

The distinction between the useful and the useless presumes a field in which such terms retain coherence—where works can be positioned, read, and evaluated along a shared axis of purpose.

 

 

 

 

It presumes, in other words, a common horizon

within which art’s relation to the social, the political, or the economic can still be negotiated.

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