I have never stood in front of Giovanni Paolo Panini’s "Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome" in the Louvre; I have only encountered it through printed art books, academic reproductions and the sterile distance of digital archives, but even in this mediated form the painting radiates a kind of intellectual gravity that not many contemporary works are capable of generating, as if the image itself were gently insisting that the viewer slow down, breathe differently and enter into a deeper mode of seeing. The canvas, painted in 1757, is monumental – not only in physical scale, but in intention: a vast architectural stage in which Panini constructs an impossible interior, a fantasy gallery filled with meticulously rendered representations of Rome’s greatest monuments – Pantheon, Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona, St. Peter’s Square – each framed painting inside the larger painting functioning as both archival preservation and a celebration of human ingenuity.

Even through paper, hundreds of years after the painter’s hand has turned to dust, the viewer can sense a radical devotion to process. The countless miniatures inside the larger composition do not merely decorate; they testify. Every brushstroke, every column meticulously aligned in correct perspective, every tiny figure moving across imagined marble floors suggests that the artist understood painting not as a spontaneous act of expression, but as a sustained relationship with time, discipline and the memory of civilization itself. It is the embodiment of an ethos in which the labor of making is honored rather than hidden and where a work’s value emerges not from how quickly it can be consumed, circulated or monetized, but from how intensely it demands engagement.

When I examine Panini’s work, however indirectly, removed from the original surface, I am struck by a sense of temporal density, a compression of accumulated hours, months, knowledge and patience. It forces me to confront a question that feels almost uncomfortable in today’s cultural climate: What kind of human being decides to spend such an astonishing amount of time painting something that could never be finished quickly? The answer is embedded within the work: someone who believes that excellence is not an outcome but a moral position, someone for whom mastery is inseparable from devotion, someone who sees time not as an inconvenience but as a medium.

This stands in violent contrast to the logic of contemporary art culture, where the dominant currency is not craft but visibility, not effort but spectacle. The modern art world, shaped by the economic incentives of consumer capitalism, has become adept at celebrating works that can be explained faster than they can be made, where the artist does not need to demonstrate skill or knowledge because the rhetoric of "conceptual gesture” can justify anything, even nothing. A banana duct-taped to a wall sells for a grotesque amount of money because the world no longer differentiates between an idea and a contribution; what matters is whether the work can generate headlines, not whether it can generate meaning. The most successful contemporary artists are not those who labor intensely over form or material, but those who have mastered the choreography of attention, the manipulation of media cycles, and the seduction of hype.

Culture of shortcuts

There is a disturbing irony that in an era obsessed with productivity, speed and optimization, art, the one domain historically associated with slowness, introspection and depth, has capitulated to the logic of acceleration. The studios of certain celebrity artists are staffed like corporations.

Jeff Koons doesn’t sculpt. Damien Hirst doesn’t paint. Many major contemporary artists outsource the entire physical production of their works to teams of anonymous fabricators. Their studios function like corporations and artists become CEOs of their own brand.

Production has replaced creation. Branding has replaced authorship. The artwork becomes a commodity whose primary function is not to endure, but to circulate. To be talked about. To be reposted. In this system, mediocrity is not a failure; it is a strategy. Mediocrity is efficient, profitable and scalable. True quality is everything the market fears: time-consuming, unpredictable, resistant to standardization.

In this context, Panini’s painting feels nearly subversive. It is an affront to everything contemporary culture values: speed, simplicity, immediacy and disposability. It proposes that knowledge deserves time, that technique requires repetition and that excellence is inherently slow. When I look at Panini’s work, I realize how rare it has become to encounter art that asks something from the viewer. Most artworks today are designed to be consumed in seconds; the composition is simplified, the concept pre-digested, the meaning made obvious or, worse, irrelevant. In a world where images flicker past us at the rate of a thousand per minute, a work that demands attention becomes almost unbearable. We have become allergic to slowness, intolerant of difficulty, impatient with anything that cannot be skimmed.

Panini’s painting feels like a message from a disappeared world – one that believed the purpose of art was not to impress, but to transform. The painting is not merely beautiful; it is demanding. It does not entertain; it teaches. It asks the viewer to participate in meaning, to follow perspective lines, to trace architectural histories, to surrender to the discipline embedded in the work. It is not a product; it is a relationship.

We often pretend that the degradation of craftsmanship is the fault of artists alone, that they have become lazy, derivative and superficial. But perhaps the deeper truth is that society itself no longer offers the conditions under which deep work can occur. Our culture rewards speed, not depth; novelty, not mastery. Quality requires endurance, patience, humility and the courage to remain invisible while working. But invisibility is now equated with irrelevance. In an age where an artist must post constantly to maintain visibility, when would there be time for excellence? When the economy of attention demands endless output, where is the space for apprenticeship, solitude, failure and slow iteration? Excellence demands obscurity, yet obscurity has become a professional risk.

What disturbs me most is not that contemporary art has lowered its standards, but that it has forgotten that standards ever existed. The disappearance of craftsmanship is not merely an aesthetic loss; it is an existential one. Craft is a spiritual discipline; it requires the artist to subordinate ego to process, to surrender control to time. There is humility in learning a skill, in realizing that your hand is inadequate, in repeating a gesture until the body understands what the mind cannot articulate. Craft forces the artist to become a student of the world rather than a performer of the self. Contemporary culture, however, has replaced that humility with performative confidence: "I do not need to know how to do anything, because everything is already justified by my intention.”

We glorify intention and neglect execution. We celebrate boldness and ignore rigor. We mistake immediacy for impact, and we confuse visibility with value. The tragedy is not that artists no longer strive for mastery; the tragedy is that the culture no longer recognizes mastery when it appears.

When I think of Panini painting those impossibly small architectural details that most viewers would never consciously notice, I am filled with a feeling that I can only describe as reverence. Reverence not toward the painting itself, but toward the commitment it embodies. His work exists as evidence of a belief that the world deserves care. That art is not merely about expression, but about responsibility. That making something well is an act of devotion, not a performance of talent.

Courage to create

We do not lose mastery because we lose talent; we lose it because we lose patience. The enemy of craftsmanship is not lack of ability, but lack of time. Our culture has made time the most inaccessible luxury. In such a world, creating something good is radical. Creating something great is revolutionary.

Panini’s painting continues to exist not because it was shocking, but because it was worthy. Not because it provoked, but because it contributed. Not because it demanded attention, but because it rewarded attention.

Perhaps the most important question is not why we no longer produce works like Panini’s, but why we no longer aspire to. Somewhere along the way, we stopped believing that anything should take a lifetime. We convinced ourselves that difficulty is elitist, that effort is naïve, that depth is outdated. We forgot that value is not measured by speed, but by permanence.

To resist mediocrity today is to perform an act of cultural rebellion. To choose quality is to declare that the world still deserves excellence. To devote oneself to craft is to insist that meaning requires effort, that art still has the capacity to outlive its moment.

Panini’s painting should be more than an image to the modern artist; it should be a warning sign saying, "go deeper, give everything.”

And perhaps, the most radical move an artist can make in modern times is to slow down and take their time for a heartfelt creation, challenging all the facilitator technologies and plain expectations of our age.