Like every day, the alarm clock rings again at 7 a.m. Coffee is no longer enough in times when burnout has become the default state of our existence, and art (once again) is forced to address one of its own eternal dilemmas: What can we do to enter the saturated minds of a society operating on autopilot? Good question. Perhaps the intelligent and logical thing to do is to think that we need art more than ever, but I think we’ve reached a point where we’re too tired even to acknowledge that need.

The collective exhaustion I’m talking about has infiltrated our lives, almost without us realizing it, and of course, our increasingly mutilated and weakened cultural experience. This isn’t just a matter of physical tiredness; it has become a state of mind that has completely transformed our capacity for attention, interest, perception, and analysis. The cursed scroll has almost forced us to consume content in bursts; while art requires from us precisely what we have the hardest time giving. Time, attention, and mental energy.

This chronic fatigue is a phenomenon that discriminates against no one. A plague that affects creators and viewers alike, generating a self-reinforcing cycle: on the one hand, exhausted artists struggle to maintain critical depth, which ends up being as sought after as it is ignored, while the audience, equally exhausted, barely has the capacity to process beyond the surface. Layers of meaning are lost in a kind of mental cloud of noise, of which we hardly remember anything and which inevitably evaporates amid the dizzying speed of modern life. Everything has its consequences, and this has created a new, more fragmented form of perception, where art must compete with a constant tsunami of stimuli.

This exhaustion hasn’t yet completed the process of becoming the accelerator of artistic transformation, and although contemporary art is constantly mutating, I see that it fails to fully connect or adapt to an audience that no longer has the energy to decipher dense manifestos or patiently contemplate an installation, leading them to other reflections… and in the creative field, I’m not talking about adaptation or simplification, but rather a “recalibration,” so to speak, of how the critical message should be conveyed to the public, and to which audience. It doesn’t have to shout louder than notifications, but rather connect with an audience that is exhausted from so much stimulation. That’s why I think art urgently needs to discover new ways of slipping into the gaps of our prostituted attention, generating experiences that don’t demand more from us, but rather keep us company, that instead of draining us of energy, revitalize us and contribute something valuable through what we experience. Before, we consumed, now we use and throw away. We must recognize that we have built a society where value lies not in permanence but in novelty.

Art obviously cannot escape this implacable logic of planned obsoleteness, that modern cult of the disposable that has permeated even the highest creative spaces, who would have thought it? Works are consumed as content, superficially digested, and discarded to make way for the next, perpetuating the extremely boring cycle of production-consumption-forgetting that significantly impoverishes our relationship with all things artistic. I really don’t know if the lack of stimulation or overstimulation itself has eroded our critical sense; but precisely in the era of overstimulation, we suffer from an intellectual starvation that leaves us incapable of discriminating, evaluating, or questioning.

We accept everything directly with indifference disguised as open-mindedness. We criticize many things, yet we don’t question much, and everything ends up being accepted in an aesthetic relativism that, far from being liberating, is the great burden on critical thinking. Don’t misunderstand me, or crucify me, but let’s admit that galleries are the silent accomplices that maintain this entire status quo. It’s true that they have and should have the power to dictate what is right and what isn’t, but in practice, their eagerness to survive in a voracious market has led them to lower the bar, orienting themselves toward fast, Instagrammable art that generates likes rather than reflections. This is how we end up sacrificing depth for momentary visibility.

Perhaps the key to all these issues lies not in resisting or fighting fatigue, but in accepting it as a natural part of our contemporary experience, coexisting with it, and using it as a respite and a fulcrum to seek and explore other avenues or forms of artistic expression. It’s not exactly about keeping art alive in an exhausted world; I think it’s better to redefine what it means to be a critic when the very act of thinking carefully has become a luxury available to only a few.

[Featured Image: Art galleries CDMX]