· Research
Sacrifice, Magic, and Making Life Beautiful
Luisa Ji | Feb 27, 2025 | Dispatch #3
There was a time when sacrifices were made of precious things—Venice in John Ruskin’s writings, haiku in Japanese village shrines offered by rice farmers, songs and dances atop a mountain for a good rain. What was offered embodied a slice of living and efforts to make life beautiful. All of these differ from the images of sacrifice we are presented with today. Yet, in essence, people gave their most precious offerings—time, craft, and the ability to breathe beauty into a form that could be shared, lived, and experienced.
Today, it is difficult to discern what modern culture offers as gifts, let alone sacrifices. Gifts often come with strings attached, and sacrifices are made at the expense of those whose suffering we have learned to tolerate. Taking a few steps back, kindness is often taken as a weakness, and generosity has retributions. In this landscape, what role does art play? How does it navigate the tension between creation, consumption, and value?
This week’s dispatch attempts to make sense of beauty and aesthetic entry points as facilitators of deeper conversations about change.
The professionalization of the arts has increasingly made art about itself—its industry, funding cycles, validation from institutional structures, or the refinement of spectacle rather than deepening its relationship with the world. Dedication to the arts has notably shifted from engaging with the world to a growing detachment between aesthetics—form, craft, and perceived beauty—and the contexts from which artistic practices emerge. For many, art is a pure form of self-expression, where their output is directly linked to their sense of self and identity, and in many instances, it doesn’t need to be social or politically engaged. While this is widely celebrated, it often erases the nuanced ways that art not produced under the association with privilege and prestige has no choice but to be socially engaged.
Ultimately, for the general public, art isn’t complicated. Why? Because people have been drawing, painting, and singing for countless reasons throughout history and will continue to do so. Some carry a profound sense of responsibility to care for their communities, while others find comfort in making art amid hardships. The medium doesn’t matter—pencil on paper is practically free, as is singing from your lungs or dancing by waving your limbs in the air. It becomes clear that we still need art in a world ruled by logic and cold, hard facts—to contemplate our choices and to develop ways of navigating them.
Modernity favours linear logic, where everything can and should be explained by science. We demand an explanation for every bit of magic we encounter, stripping it of its enchantment. Would you still enjoy magic if you knew exactly how it worked? Magicians do. I believe artists do, too. To see the world’s imperfections and injustices yet still believe in its beauty—enough to want to share it—is its own form of magic.
In many ways, art provides insights into the economic and social structures underpinning modern life. While it may not always fall into traditional categories, software platforms can serve as mediums for artistic inquiry and intervention. Artist-owned and artist-made marketplace platforms like Subvert and Metalabel demonstrate that challenging corporate dominance in cultural production is possible. These models prove that alternative marketplace structures for the arts can exist. Experiments like DAOs and cooperatives illustrate how artistic value can be defined differently. They may embody aesthetics and ethos vastly different from those of Goblin Market, yet they share a similar practice: artists gaining more autonomy in shaping their own spaces for creation and distribution.
Reliance on persistent distribution platforms, however, come with their own issues. Our culture is caught in a cycle of abandoning old platforms once their inhabitants and culture become corrupted or inadequate, only to move to the next. The expectation that someone else will create the right container for one's artistic work is prevalent. Whether an artwork in a gallery, a dancer on stage, or a musician in an orchestra, artists are often positioned as chess pieces placed by someone higher in the chain of command, often holding power and resources. Based on permission and rules, this model incentivizes artists to forfeit the agency of laying down stakes and setting the context for one's work. Moreover, consolidating resources and power enabled by this model prohibits the negotiation of new boundaries.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Technology provides a valuable framework for why context and containers should be integral to artistic practices. She argues that instead of viewing technology as a weapon—a tool for conquest—we should see it as a carrier bag, a vessel for gathering and holding knowledge, culture, and meaning. Art, too, can and should function this way. Rather than being a compartmentalized activity separate from work and life, artistic practices offer the opportunity to steward explorations of labour, value, and the unseen forces shaping how we engage with economies and other aspects with significant pulls on our lives. Just as we need a cup or a bottle to fetch water from a river rather than carrying the river itself, containers serve as essential technologies that help us access and safeguard vital resources. Logically, any cup or any bottle is capable of holding water, but why make a cup beautiful when a plain one from the discount store would do just fine?
The argument that “nobody supports art anymore” falls apart under scrutiny. It is one that many working in the arts enjoy waving around. However, people continue to spend money on curated, aesthetic experiences—Disneyland, fine dining, jewelry, immersive theatre, and weddings worth an entire downpayment to a house. The issue is not a decline in public interest in art but a shift in economic structures that prioritize spectacle, one that is shaped through an image of wealth and prestige and ultimately plays a role in deceit—people will pay for a small moment of delight especially when tied to the question of self-worth. Deceit is different from magic, and perhaps magic is something we all seek but often rare to encounter. It is a performance, a temporary suspension of logic, an enchanted experience meant to be shared. Like magic, artistic inquiry is not just about creating works or chasing perfection—it is about shaping the conditions in which art is made, exchanged, and understood.
We need a beautiful cup to drink from because the sense of joy from holding a beautiful cup provides an entryway into deeper engagement with the material world. The aesthetic experience is not a distraction but a way of reframing social and economic conversations, making them less abstract or detached and more embodied. We are conditioned to see beautiful things as frivolous and impractical because they are often associated with displays of wealth—after all, an artisan must eat, and a wealthy person has the means to acquire objects of value.
At the same time, we face the unspoken rules dictating where art, regardless of its medium or form, can and cannot exist. The concept of the third space—areas outside of work and home—encompasses bars, cafés, and nightlife venues, which serve as social gathering spaces but are primarily driven by commercial interests and consumption. However, these spaces are steadily declining as rising costs force businesses out of their neighbourhoods and people recognize the unjust economic structures in all creative fields. In response, many have taken matters into their own hands. Chefs, bartenders, and DJs run pop-ups, dinner clubs, and ephemeral happenings at unconventional venues to sustain themselves while maintaining artistic freedom. These efforts are often dismissed as internet sensations without substance or co-opted by luxury brands looking to uphold an image of exclusivity and prestige. Yet, they do provide new pathways for art to be reconstituted into everyday life as well as new forms of economic models to emerge in the face of consolidation of resources and distribution channels in the broader category of cultural production.
We are in an era of shapeshifters—artists taking on multiple roles, facing multiple challenges, and seeking ways to materialize our visions through each of our own crafts and artistry. The challenge remains: how do we establish the containers and contexts from which our artistic works emerge, and ultimately worlds to inhabit, as well as frameworks to engage with others that reflect beauty, commitment, and integrity—modes of "sacrifice" that enrich our lives rather than hollowing us out?