When Everything Becomes Art: The Crisis of Meaning in the Modern Age

The word art has never meant just one thing. In different eras it has served ritual, power, devotion, pleasure, propaganda, and inquiry. What changed in the modern period was the expectation that art could also be a self-reflective practice; a space where form, thought, and intention meet to produce meaning. That expectation hasn’t vanished, but it has thinned. The category “art” has expanded so rapidly and circulation has accelerated so dramatically that it is hard to sustain distinction, and meaning is harder still.

This is not nostalgia for rigid academies, nor a dismissal of access or experimentation. It’s a question of criteria: how do we tell the difference between an image and a work, between expression and art? When everything is presented as if it were art, the concept risks dissolving into atmosphere.

Inflation and the erosion of standards

The blurring of difference is cultural, not accidental. Pierre Bourdieu argued that judgments of taste are socially formed; value emerges from shared practices of distinction and knowledgeable debate—not from mere preference (1). When those practices weaken, evaluation slides toward “I like it / I don’t,” which is no criterion at all.

Twentieth-century critics tried, in different ways, to hold a line. Clement Greenberg (formalism) defended rigor, difficulty, and medium specificity against easy effects and kitsch (2). Arthur Danto later showed that after Warhol, objects become art within an “artworld” of theories and discourse (3). Neither position is a recipe for gatekeeping; both are reminders that art acquires meaning in relation to standards and conversations larger than any single work.

Meanwhile, mass reproduction (and now frictionless digital duplication) alters reception. Walter Benjamin warned that technical reproducibility drains works of their singular “aura,” shifting attention from contemplative encounter to endless circulation (4). Today that circulation is hyper-normalized: a stream where novelty is constant, context is thin, and the time to form judgment is limited.

The result is inflation: more production, more visibility, fewer shared criteria. It is not democratization in the best sense, where many can enter a demanding conversation, but flattening,and there, conversation itself is optional.

Instant validation and the economy of attention

Inflation would be manageable if we slowed down to think. Instead, the dominant incentive is speed. Social platforms reward immediacy, repetition, and affect; visibility stands in for value. In Bourdieu’s terms, symbolic capital accrues through presence rather than through hard-won recognition (1).

The consequence is a training effect. Artists (and audiences) learn to optimize for metrics: produce faster, smoother, more “relatable.” Adorno and Horkheimer called this the culture industry: standardization masked as choice, satisfaction delivered on schedule (5). The contemporary twist is that we, not just studios or labels, help standardize ourselves.

As Byung-Chul Han argues, an achievement/attention culture erodes contemplation; production becomes incessant, interior life thins, and they lead toburnout (6). In that register, much “art” becomes content: instantly legible, instantly consumed, instantly replaced. What should slow us down is designed to pass us by.

If the previous section described cause (erosion of distinction), this is effect: a loop where validation precedes reflection, and the work is treated as a vehicle for attention rather than a site of meaning.

Culture as conversation

Meaning doesn’t arise from objects alone; it arises from encounters, the discursive life around works. Jürgen Habermas described the public sphere as the social space where people deliberate matters of common concern (7). In modernity, art helped constitute such spaces: studios, journals, galleries, cafés, classrooms; places where disagreement sharpened understanding.

That sphere has not disappeared, but it has fragmented. The current “audience sphere” favors reaction over reflection; criticism is mistaken for hostility; agreement is confused with support. When we lose venues where rigorous, generous critique is normal, we also lose the procedures by which value is argued into being.

Rebuilding that capacity is local work. A cultural hub—whether a gallery, bookshop, or brewery reimagined as a forum—can host the slow practices that give art traction: workshops where techniques are learned, screenings where context is offered, discussions where stakes are named. Conversation is not decoration; it is infrastructure for meaning.

A return to meaning (without retreat)

Calling for standards is not code for elitism or a return to one sanctioned style. It is a call for discipline and honesty: to study histories before we break them; to test intentions against forms; to ask not only what a work expresses, but what it does to perception, thought, and relation.

Adorno insisted that art’s truth content lies in resistance: not pleasing the world as it is, but disclosing its contradictions (5). Debord warned that in a society organized as spectacle, appearance displaces experience (8). If we take both seriously, the task is clear: make work that interrupts easy seeing; build contexts that support difficult attention; prefer development over display.

Practically, that means fewer events done better; Curating for depth rather than speed or quantity; embedding critique into programming; and treating audience not as customers to retain but as partners in understanding. In such conditions, “modern art” does not recover a mythical past; it recovers its modern ambition—to think, to trouble, to remake attention.

When everything becomes art, nothing has to matter. When we restore conversation, criteria, and care, art can matter again—not by exclusion, but by raising the terms of participation.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Greenberg, C. (1939). “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Partisan Review.
Danto, A. (1964). “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy, 61(19).
Benjamin, W. (1936). “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”
Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. (1944). Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Han, B.-C. (2010). The Burnout Society.
Habermas, J. (1962). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle.