We mistake exhaustion for depth, forgetting that the idea was always hard work.
In one of the final issues of Foam from 2024, Missing the mirror: Photography through the lens of AII came across a familiar tone – the anxiety of art trying to defend its humanity against intelligent images. While reading this issue, I noticed a thought repeating itself. Art, he suggested, is made through effort, through traces of struggle, through the body that labors to produce. It is a comforting belief, old and romantic in its tone. Yet behind this comfort lies a deeper narrative: this pain should be the ultimate proof of authenticity.
Underlying this belief is an implicit premise: that true art cannot exist without a body, its existence must be proven by effort. This assumption has an old moral weight inherited from the romantic cult of the suffering artist. It struggles to the core of meaning and measures pain as reality. The body becomes a guarantor of authenticity, a visible sign of effort, a human fingerprint left on the surface of an indifferent world. What appears to be a defense of art is actually a defense of exhaustion as a moral value.
What disappears in this logic is everything that cannot be seen: the intellectual…