Spiritual Return

September 4, 2025


The art world, over the past few decades and especially in recent years, has leaned harder and harder into the language of commerce. Sales became metrics, collectors became markets, and the work, at least in many corners, began to feel like a product in a carefully curated catalog. Even the language surrounding it changed. We began to talk more about "deliverables" and "price points" than presence, mystery, or meaning. Art, that once whispered and trembled with something unseen, was increasingly shaped to fit into the economies of immediacy. Made to order. Designed to sell. And in that shift, something sacred began to disappear.

But now, quietly, there’s a turning. You can feel it in the air. Galleries, some long-standing, some just born, are closing, changing hands, recalibrating. The machine isn’t humming quite the same. It’s as if the structure itself is acknowledging what many artists and thinkers have felt for years: that we strayed too far. That in the rush to sell, to scale, to stay relevant, we forgot what made art necessary in the first place. Not its usefulness. Not its marketability. But its mystery. Its spirit.

A return to the spiritual is not some nostalgic reach backward, it’s a reawakening. A remembering. Because art has always been rooted in the intangible. In the unseen forces that move beneath the surface. From cave paintings to religious icons, from the depths of abstraction to the raw edge of performance, art has always functioned as a bridge to something more. Something beyond language, beyond transaction. A place where time bends and the self dissolves, where we come face to face with what we can’t name. And that is what the market can never fully own. What can never be replicated or scaled. The ineffable. The sacred.

When art becomes a commodity, it loses its teeth. Its strangeness. Its necessity. It becomes decoration, something to match a couch or fill a space. But when art is allowed to remain mysterious, when it resists clarity, when it refuses to be pinned down, it begins to breathe again. It invites us to slow down, to question, to feel something we didn’t expect. It becomes not just a thing to look at, but a space to enter. A place to get lost.

Perhaps this moment, this slow, uncomfortable contraction, is not a crisis but an opportunity. A space for artists to step back from the noise and reconnect with what called them in the first place. To make work that doesn’t need to explain itself. To create not for consumption, but for communion.

The art world may be shifting, but that doesn’t mean it’s dying. It might mean it’s waking up. And in that waking, it’s beginning to remember what it forgot, that the most vital art isn’t always the loudest, the most visible, or the most expensive. It’s the work that lingers. That haunts. That touches something ancient and unknowable in us. The work that reminds us, if only for a moment, that we’re more than what we own. That we are still capable of awe.

That’s what the art world has been missing. Not another fair, not another trend, but a return to wonder. A return to mystery. A return to the spiritual.