Dear Future 7/3/25

Dear Future,
 

Here is an essay on the value of aesthetics to the future of our planet, from this present time July, 2025, as someone deeply moved by art—by color and form, by gesture and sound, by all the human efforts to make beauty visible our a world.

We live in a time where art competes with noise. Screens flicker endlessly; algorithms tell us what to like; convenience often outruns contemplation. And yet, even now—especially now—art remains a sanctuary. Aesthetic experience offers more than pleasure: it creates space for attention, wonder, and empathy. In a world fragmented by distraction, the act of truly seeing or hearing becomes a form of resistance.

Art has always been more than decoration. It carries memory, culture, dissent, longing. A single painting can hold centuries of grief. A sculpture can embody a revolution. A melody can thread together people across continents and generations. Even in abstraction, even in silence, aesthetics reminds us what it means to feel alive—complexly, deeply, joyfully, painfully.

I hope that in your future time, beauty has not been flattened into branding or swallowed whole by commerce. I hope your museums are not mausoleums, and your artists are not mere content creators. I hope your world's visionaries still dare to challenge and provoke, to soothe and elevate.

From our now, you inherit not only what we make, but how we choose to see, the beautiful, the tragic, the poetic, the mysterious. If we have succeeded in passing on even a glimmer of reverence for the power of art, may it flourish in the hearts of the living.

Let us continue the legacy of autonomous inspiration,

and bow to the creativity phenomenon in us all.

Future Eyes
July, 2025