ON WHY ART MATTERS | 27 DECEMBER 2025 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Why create, why perspire, why bare one’s artistic soul to the world? These were questions I found myself asking after a conversation where I realized that I no longer have any capacity to spend my life on anything other than what it’s meant to be spent on. This almost alchemical search for meaning, story, depth, connection, has taken over me in recent years. In a process of rapid maturation and identity integration, all that is excess has burned away. I find myself more compelled by moments with strangers that have an essence of humanity than by any egoic need to claim material or energetic space.
But we all have to have a way of being. And I can’t merely sit here waiting for life to collide with me (although it always does in beautiful, somewhat cinematic ways, as anyone close to me knows). To live the life of an artist - what does that mean, and does it have intrinsic value?
Yes, it does, because it cures what underlies all these contemplations: the desire to know that life, existence, effort, love - all of it - actually means something.
A connection with the world, and the searching for it, and the maintenance of it, and the development of it - and then the sharing of those discoveries - is sustenance to the human spirit. It reminds us that there is, and always has been, a soul at the centre of things, and that it is something we all recognise when we encounter it. Art, true art - channelled from something beyond the self and shaped patiently by the hands of a caring craftsperson - is material proof of this. Each time we encounter it, we are reminded that our inner longings are not isolated phenomena, that others have felt this same ache, this same reverence, this same quiet urgency to understand and to express.
Art matters because it slows time. Because it dignifies attention. Because it allows us to sit with what would otherwise pass unnoticed. It creates a shared interior space where meaning is not dictated, but offered. Where questions are held open rather than resolved. Where beauty is not an indulgence, but a form of truth.
To live as an artist, then, is not to withdraw from life, but to enter into it more fully - to pay closer attention, to feel more deeply, and to take responsibility for translating experience into something that can be received by others. It is an ethical stance as much as an aesthetic one. A commitment to presence. A refusal to live numbly or cheaply. A choice to honour what is fleeting by giving it form.
So I move into 2026 with a deeper resolve to live this way - in conscious relationship to the world, to people, to place, to time - trusting that the act of paying attention, of making meaning, of offering something honest and well-made, is not only worthwhile, but necessary. Not as a claim, not as a performance, but as a quiet contribution. A signal, sent into the dark, that says: I was here, I felt this, and I cared enough to shape it.
