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.

Not as a dramatic rupture, but as a gradual dispersal.

                                                             The structures remain—institutions, markets, discourses—but the conditions that once allowed their claims to cohere no longer fully obtain.

Art continues, but without a shared project in which its function might be collectively understood.

In this sense, the contemporary condition is not one of intensified debate around art’s purpose,

                                           but of its quiet exhaustion.