A photograph can sometimes formulate a question more effectively than an entire conference on aesthetics. Recently, I encountered an image circulating on social media: on one side, the serene face of a classically styled marble sculpture; on the other, a contemporary figure, its features distorted, its surface aggressively gilded. Across the two appeared a deceptively simple sentence: "Why did we stop making beautiful things?” The accompanying reflection mourned the disappearance of patient craftsmanship, of buildings designed to outlive their makers, of objects created with a sense of obligation to people not yet born. It was the kind of post that invites instant agreement. Yet the longer I considered it, the more I felt that the question deserved something more demanding than nostalgia.

For a start, we have not stopped making beautiful things. Artists, architects, designers and craftspeople continue to produce work of astonishing delicacy and intelligence. Nor was the past an uninterrupted procession of marble goddesses and impeccably proportioned façades. History has reached us through a highly selective archive: the masterpieces that were preserved, the monuments that could be restored, the treasures powerful enough to survive neglect and war. Our comparison, therefore, is often between the exceptional remnants of yesterday and the full, bewildering inventory of today. That is hardly a fair contest.

Nevertheless, the emotional force of the question is real. It speaks to a dissatisfaction that extends well beyond artistic taste. We inhabit a world capable of manufacturing more things, more quickly, and distributing more images of them than any previous society. Yet abundance does not necessarily create attachment. We can furnish an apartment in an afternoon, replace its contents a year later, and scarcely remember where anything came from. We can build an impressive tower without creating a street on which anyone wishes to linger. We can produce a technically flawless image in seconds without investing a single moment in the act of seeing. What we may have lost is not the capacity for beauty, but the conditions in which beauty acquires meaning.

Classical art was founded upon particular conceptions of bodily harmony, civic virtue, divinity and ideal proportion. Its achievements remain extraordinary, but its standards were never neutral or universal. Much of the history of modern art consists precisely of questioning who has the authority to define the beautiful. The fractured body, the unfinished surface, the unsettling face and the deliberately awkward form emerged not because artists forgot how to draw, but because experience itself could no longer be contained within inherited ideals. After the catastrophes of the 20th century, an immaculate representation of harmony could, at times, appear less truthful than an image of rupture.

This is why the comparison between an elegant marble figure and a contemporary sculpture can be intellectually misleading. A classical work may seek the perfection of form; a contemporary work may seek to expose the instability of identity, the violence of desire or the absurdity of consumer culture. One is not necessarily more accomplished because it is more pleasing. Beauty and artistic value overlap, but they are not interchangeable. To dismiss every disturbing work as evidence of civilizational decline would be to misunderstand the essential freedom of art: its right not only to console us, but also to confront us.

And yet I resist the opposite temptation, equally fashionable in some cultural circles, to treat beauty as an embarrassing or intellectually naive ambition. Somewhere along the way, we began to confuse difficulty with depth, provocation with originality and ugliness with seriousness. A work does not become profound merely because it refuses to please. The contemporary artist should be free to reject conventional beauty, certainly, but should also be free to pursue it without apology. We need neither the tyranny of classical perfection nor the tyranny of permanent disillusionment.

Perhaps the more urgent distinction is not between old and new, or figurative and abstract, but between attention and indifference. Consider the hand-carved doorway that makes a passer-by stop, the staircase whose curve seems to understand the movement of the human body, or a ceramic vessel bearing the slight irregularities of its maker’s touch. What moves us is not merely their decoration. It is the evidence of thought concentrated into matter. Such objects tell us that someone considered the experience of a stranger, and considered it worth the effort. Their beauty is an ethic of attention made visible.

Architecture reveals the stakes with particular clarity because, unlike a painting in a gallery, a building cannot easily be avoided. We encounter architecture whether we have chosen it or not. It determines the light entering a room, the shade available on a summer afternoon, the generosity of a pavement, the scale at which a child experiences the city. A city may accumulate expensive developments while becoming progressively poorer in human terms. The problem is not glass, steel or concrete; modern materials have produced magnificent architecture. The problem arises when the only questions asked of a building concern speed of delivery, saleable floor area and immediate return. A façade becomes packaging, a public square becomes a marketing image, and a neighborhood becomes a financial instrument before it becomes a place to live.

There is a particular sadness in the disappearance of buildings designed to age gracefully. A good building need not pretend to be eternal, but it should be capable of entering into a relationship with time. Stone develops a patina; timber records use; a well-conceived public space gathers memories that no architect could have anticipated. In contrast, the disposable building seems to arrive already awaiting its replacement. Its materials are chosen for an immediate impression, its details for a sales brochure, its future scarcely considered. When we build in this way, we are not only wasting resources. We are withdrawing from the future a form of generosity that previous generations occasionally extended to us.

This withdrawal is connected to the economics of speed. Craftsmanship requires not only skill but conditions that allow skill to flourish: training, fair compensation, continuity and the freedom to make a decision that cannot be justified by efficiency alone. The artisan’s commitment to careful making defends a different understanding of value. Time is not simply a cost to be eliminated; sometimes it is the substance from which value is made. If every process is reorganized around acceleration, the work that requires sustained attention begins to look irrational, even when it is precisely the work we hope to inherit.

Digital culture intensifies this contradiction. Never have so many visual experiences competed for our attention, and never has the act of looking felt so vulnerable to interruption. Images arrive before we have finished understanding the previous image. Architecture is often conceived for the photograph; exhibitions for the shareable moment; objects for their ability to appear desirable on a small illuminated screen. Visibility becomes confused with significance. An artwork may be encountered by millions and examined by almost no one. The danger is not technology itself, which can extend artistic possibility in remarkable ways. It is the reduction of aesthetic experience to a sequence of impressions too brief to mature into memory.

As an artist, I find this especially troubling because making and seeing are intimately related disciplines. The studio teaches a person to remain with uncertainty: to change a composition, to remove an element, to begin again, to recognize that what first appears successful may not survive a second look. The same is true of the viewer. To stand before a work long enough for its silences to become perceptible is to resist the assumption that everything valuable must announce itself immediately.

There is also a social dimension that sentimental accounts of craftsmanship tend to overlook. The magnificent monuments of the past were not produced by patience alone. They depended upon wealth, political authority, systems of patronage and, frequently, labor whose makers remained anonymous. If we wish to recover the dignity of making, we must resist romanticizing the inequalities that accompanied some of its greatest achievements. A genuinely renewed culture of beauty would value the person who builds as much as the person who commissions, the craftsperson as much as the celebrated designer, and the public that lives with an object as much as the collector who owns it.

This is where the conversation meets sustainability. To speak of beauty today without speaking of durability is increasingly inadequate. The object that can be repaired, the building that can be adapted, the material that carries a history without becoming waste: these suggest an aesthetic grounded in responsibility rather than novelty. Far from diminishing creativity, the careful use of resources can deepen invention. The most compelling design may be the one that allows us to desire less replacement, not more consumption. An object becomes beautiful in a particularly profound sense when we wish to care for it.

Beauty also belongs to the public realm. It should not be confined to auction rooms, private collections or luxury interiors. The ordinary school, the neighborhood library, the hospital corridor and the municipal garden deserve aesthetic intelligence. A society discloses its values not only through the masterpieces it preserves in museums, but through the environments it considers acceptable for everyday life. When public beauty is treated as an unnecessary expense, we communicate something bleak about the people expected to inhabit those spaces. When it is treated as a shared good, architecture and art become quiet instruments of dignity.

This is one reason cultural heritage and contemporary creation should never be imagined as opposing forces. Heritage gives us a language of continuity; contemporary art gives us the possibility of changing that language. The conservation of a historical building and the commissioning of a daring new work can express the same conviction: that culture is worth investing in beyond the next financial quarter. This is also the promise of cultural diplomacy at its most meaningful. What a civilization chooses to preserve, produce and share tells the world what it believes human life is for.

So why does the question "Why did we stop making beautiful things?” resonate so widely? Perhaps because beneath it lies another question: Why have we become so willing to accept environments that ask so little of our imagination and offer so little to our senses? We do not necessarily miss columns, marble or ornament. We miss the feeling that something was made with us in mind, even if its maker would never know our names. We miss encounters that interrupt our routines not through spectacle, but through wonder.

The answer cannot be a return to an idealized past, and it should not be a campaign against the art of the present. But we also need the courage to insist that imagination, craftsmanship and public generosity are not obsolete virtues. We should ask of every new building, artwork and object not merely whether it can be produced, sold or circulated, but whether it deserves to exist in the world we will leave behind.

Perhaps the most beautiful things are those that refuse to regard the future as someone else’s problem. They carry within them a modest act of faith: that people we will never meet may one day pause, look closely and feel that their experience mattered to us. Beauty, in this sense, is neither an antique ideal nor a superficial luxury. It is a form of responsibility stretching beyond the limits of a single life.

We have not forgotten how to make beautiful things. The question is whether we are still prepared to give them the time, care and conviction they require.

More than that, beauty sometimes reveals itself only to those willing to stay and see.