Art today seems increasingly stripped of the body that creates it. In an era driven by efficiency, automation, and algorithmic logic, there is a growing sense that something human is fading. Where is the artist’s hand, the mistake, the fatigue, the breath between brushstrokes?
Dehumanization doesn’t happen overnight. It is a subtle process—often imperceptible—in which the logics of production, consumption, and visibility slowly reshape the very meaning of creating. It begins with seemingly harmless shifts: shorter deadlines, higher expectations for visibility, the prioritization of digital formats over tactile experiences.
Accelerated Formats, Compressed Time
We live in a rush. Everything must be produced quickly, circulate faster still, and vanish just as fast. This logic of immediacy affects art as well. Works are conceived for instant impact on social media, optimized for digital reproduction, and often consumed in seconds—with a scroll.
What matters now is not how long one looks, but how many times it is seen. Art becomes just another image, lost among many others. This shift favors spectacle over subtlety, quantity over depth. As a result, the contemplative rhythm that once defined art appreciation is eroded.
How can art resist this velocity that turns everything fleeting? Perhaps through slowness, repetition, physicality. Through reclaiming time as a medium and process as part of meaning.
From Sensitivity to Optimization
In this landscape, our criteria of quality shift. What matters is whether it “works,” if it draws attention, if it creates engagement. Sensitivity, process, and material take a back seat. The artwork ceases to be a place for contemplation and becomes a visual product—optimized for the algorithm.
This isn’t romantic criticism but a real concern: can art retain its expressive power if it fully adapts to logics of efficiency? Or are we witnessing a loss of depth, of complexity, of mystery?
Artists may be tempted to conform to dominant modes of visibility. But doing so risks flattening the singularity of their vision. Art’s strength lies in what escapes formula, in what resists immediate clarity.
Art Without the Artist
Another symptom of dehumanization is the emergence of AI-generated images that mimic human-made works. While some are visually impressive, they lack experience, memory, lived history. They are art without an artist. Image without biography.
Can a work move us if it wasn’t made from a body, from a concrete story? Some say yes. Others believe art without intention or embodiment loses its human root. Personally, I think the question remains open—but urgently worth asking.
What does it mean to create in a world where machines can imitate style but not sensation?
How do we distinguish between resemblance and authenticity? Between composition and consciousness?
Presence as Resistance
Against this backdrop, presence becomes a political act. Being there, looking slowly, touching materials, making by hand—all this takes on new value. The bodily experience, both for the artist and the viewer, can be a form of resistance against the trend to dematerialize everything.
In my practice, I insist on slow processes. I paint by hand, work in layers, leave traces. Not out of nostalgia, but because I believe in the power of the embodied gesture. Because every stroke carries a decision, an emotion, a pause. And that, for now, no machine can replicate.
The value of the body is not only in its ability to make, but in its vulnerability, its capacity to err, to feel, to doubt. These are the elements that breathe life into a piece. They remind us that art is not only made, but lived.
Open Conclusion: What Do We Want to Preserve?
The dehumanization of art is not an inevitable catastrophe, but it is a real risk. It’s not about rejecting technology, but about thinking carefully about how we use it. About deciding what we want to preserve: emotion? slowness? the sensory experience?
What kind of art world do we want to build? One that mirrors the logic of production lines, or one that honors the unpredictable gestures of the human hand? Art can continue to be a space of humanity, but for that it needs time, bodies, silence, risk. Not everything must adapt. Some things are valuable precisely because they resist.
Continue the Dialogue
If you’re interested in exploring these tensions between the body, art, and technology, I invite you to visit my blog at guarcholga.es/blog, where I share texts, reflections, and processes around a creative practice that still believes in the human.
