Enough with the beautiful art bullshit.
Seriously, enough.

Ever since Marcel Duchamp stuck that bicycle wheel on a stool in 1913 – the first readymade in history – art stopped kissing beauty’s ass and started getting serious. And whoever’s still crying because “that stuff isn’t art” simply hasn’t figured out that we’ve gone from being analog photographers of what exists to surgeons of the human soul.

Joseph Kosuth said it clearly: art is idea.
Bernar Venet doubled down: art is knowledge.

No more decoration for bourgeois living rooms or monuments to the glory of the powerful. Contemporary art slaps you in the face with concepts you can’t ignore, forces you to confront fears you’d rather keep buried, and shoves uncomfortable truths in your face that society pretends not to see.

The Point of No Return

That “damned” wheel of Duchamp’s wasn’t just a provocative gesture. It was a declaration of war against centuries of decorative art. From that moment on, every artwork had to have something to say, otherwise it was just craftsmanship in disguise. End of the gravy train for those who only knew how to copy reality with technical mastery but zero intellectual depth.

Before the 1900s, the artist was fundamentally a visual translator of the world: saw a landscape, reproduced it on canvas. Saw a face, immortalized it in marble. Good with their hands, sure, but didn’t necessarily have to think. Conceptual art flipped everything: now you have to think first, then – possibly – create. Technique became servant to the idea, no longer master.

Goodbye to the Dumb Artist

“Dumb as an artist” – this expression doesn’t hold up anymore.

The contemporary artist must have the distinctive traits of a sociologist, philosopher, or psychologist. They must know how to read the signs of the times, interpret collective neuroses, translate the intangible into tangible form. They can no longer afford to be a mere executor of commissions or serial producer of pretty pictures.

Take Ai Weiwei destroying a 2000-year-old Han dynasty urn. It’s not vandalism, it’s a manifesto on the destruction of historical memory in modern China.

Or Banksy having “Girl with Balloon” self-destruct during the Sotheby’s auction: it’s not marketing, it’s a fierce reflection on the art market as a meaning-devouring machine. Or maybe on life’s ephemeral nature or what we value as valuable?

Substance Above All

Beauty has become incidental, accessory, a side effect. If it’s there, fine. If it’s not, so be it.

What matters is that the work digs into you, gives you chills or makes you angry. That it forces you to ask questions you’ve never asked yourself or had forgotten.

Contemporary art doesn’t have to please: it has to work. Like bitter medicine that cures ailments you didn’t even know you had.

Sure, this requires much more refined artistic sensitivity from both creator and audience. Having an eye for color or proportion is no longer enough. You need culture, you need symbolic reading ability, you need the courage to accept that art can be uncomfortable, disturbing, even repugnant, you need the courage to interpret and read between the lines constructively and sometimes critically.

The Brush Nostalgics

Obviously the purists scream. “That’s not art, it’s a joke!” they shout in front of Duchamp’s urinal or Warhol’s Brillo box. But these are the same people who a century ago would have spat on the Impressionists because they didn’t finish the contours properly. Art has always pissed off conservatives, it’s its job.

Art is knowing how to express originality in a world of copies.

The point is you can’t go back.

After Duchamp, after Beuys, after Cattelan, art that says nothing is just expensive decoration.

And that’s fine, for crying out loud. The world also needs beautiful things to hang on the wall.

But let’s call them by their name: design, craftsmanship, decoration.

Contemporary art is something else, even if it can be very beautiful. It’s just that what it represents is worth much more than its exterior.

Art as Archaeology of the Soul

Today’s artist is an archaeologist of the collective unconscious. They dig into the fears, obsessions, contradictions of their era and bring them to light through installations, performances, concepts. They don’t care if the result is beautiful according to traditional canons. They care that it’s true, that it’s necessary, that it says something that needs to be said.

Damien Hirst putting a shark in formaldehyde isn’t making a still life. He’s talking about death as a constant presence in life, our relationship with mortality, our obsession with preserving the ephemeral.

And maybe the putrefaction of the first version due to the error in chemical proportions of the substances that kept the shark (poorly) preserved is also part of the work and its meaning.

A precedent for Banksy’s artwork self-destruction?

Art is applied philosophy, not decoration.

But here we arrive at the most interesting and paradoxical point of this evolution: the more conceptual art becomes, the more sensitivity it requires to be understood. It’s as if art has become elitist upward instead of downward. 

Before, knowing how to recognize beauty was enough – an essentially instinctive, superficial ability.

Now you need to know how to decipher codes, contextualize references, catch ironic (and often cutting, provocative) overlaps of meaning.

The Audience That Doesn’t Get It (And Why That’s Normal)

And that’s why many people feel excluded from contemporary art. Not out of stupidity, but for lack of interpretive tools. It’s like expecting to appreciate an Umberto Eco novel without ever having read anything before. Conceptual art presupposes a stratified artistic culture, cultural sensitivity, a background of references that not everyone possesses.

And sometimes even innate intuition.

But all this doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It means it has grown up, become adult. Like literature, like music, like auteur cinema. Not everything has to be for everyone, and that’s okay.

What’s important is that there’s space for both dimensions: popular, purely aesthetic, and immediate “art,” and that which requires study and preparation to be fully understood.

The Revolution Is Irreversible

After more than a century since the beginning of this revolution, the accounts are clear. Art has definitively abandoned the role of handmaiden to beauty to become critical interpreter of reality. And whoever hasn’t yet understood that we live in an era where artistic expression must have substance beyond form can always visit museums of the past and dream of a world where knowing how to draw well was enough to be considered an artist.

But history doesn’t go backward.

And art, the real kind, has stopped being consolatory to become necessary.

Disturbing, perhaps. Beautiful, not always. But indispensable for understanding who we are and where we’re going.

And this, damn it, is much more important than any compositional harmony or technical perfection.

Contemporary art has freed us from the tyranny of beauty to deliver us to the responsibility of meaning. A giant step forward, even if many still prefer to walk backward.

So, what makes a work of art “art” in 2025? 

Not beauty, not technique, not the price paid at auction. It’s the ability to say something that needs to be said. To dig into the soul of our time and pull out truths we’d rather ignore. To force us to think, even when thinking hurts.

An artwork today must be necessary, strong, not decorative. It must illuminate dark corners of the human condition that civil society prefers to keep in the dark.

If a work leaves you indifferent, if it doesn’t change anything inside you, if after seeing it you go home the same as before, then it’s probably not art.

It’s expensive furniture, sophisticated design, quality craftsmanship. All respectable things, to be clear. But art is another beast.

The art of 2025 is Duchamp’s child, raised by Warhol, educated by Koons, tempered by Banksy.

It doesn’t ask permission to exist and doesn’t apologize for not being beautiful. It knows its mission isn’t to beautify the world, but to explain it. And if in doing so it turns out disturbing, provocative, even repulsive, so be it.

Better art that shakes consciences than a thousand masterpieces that decorate living rooms without saying a word. That’s just beauty that doesn’t dance.

This is today’s art.

Take it or leave it.

But if you leave it, don’t complain later about not understanding contemporary art, much less the world you live in.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​