Why is art necessary at this moment?

Art is not necessary because it saves, redeems, or responds to a crisis.
Those arguments are weak, because any practice could claim the same role.

Art is necessary now for a more precise reason: it is the only socially recognized practice capable of suspending purpose without having to justify itself through effectiveness, impact, or improvement.

We live under a permanent regime of urgency. Everything must respond, solve, optimize, or position itself. In this context, practices such as politics, education, therapy, or activism operate legitimately, but always oriented toward explicit goals and measurable outcomes. They promise results and are therefore required to deliver them.

Art operates differently.

It creates situations of shared experience without a contract of improvement, without a promise of healing, learning, or social transformation. What happens there is not a means to something else. Time is not functional. The body is not an instrument. Relation is not utilitarian.

Other practices can produce effects similar to those of art. The difference does not lie in the effects themselves, but in the regime under which those effects are produced. In art, they exist without owing anything to anyone. They may fail, displace, disturb, or remain unresolved, and this does not invalidate the practice. Even when art is pressured to justify itself, something in it resists being reduced to purpose.

At this historical moment, when everything is called upon to be urgent, productive, and justifiable, art is necessary because it introduces a regime of exception in which the logic of urgency can be interrupted. Not to escape reality, but to make it perceptible.

Art does not transform the world.
It transforms the conditions through which the world is perceived, felt, and negotiated, locally, temporarily, and without guarantees.

This is not little.
It is precisely what no other practice can do without ceasing to be what it is.