YOU KNOW THE OLD SAYING “There’s no time like the present”? One gets the sense that there truly has never been a time like now. What we’re living through is less a moment than a mood: charged, unstable, insistently alive. The present tense has become its own aesthetic: immediate, raw, a little feral. It’s baked into the way we scroll, stream, protest, love, hate, process. The planet is warming. The culture is morphing. Our senses of freedom, independence, sovereignty, responsibility, and humanity have been tossed up like plates and are suspended, spinning, precariously in midair. To be alive right now is to exist in a state of extremes: of radical abundance and shocking scarcity, of collapse and reinvention, of pure exhilaration and utter dread. The systems we’ve inherited—around art, beauty,…
