Value in the inaccessible

We live in a moment when artificial intelligence has made visual culture mass-produced and, essentially, cheap. Images, style, and even “beauty” can now be created by anyone — quickly, effortlessly, and with nothing at stake. When everything became accessible, it stopped being a luxury.

In this reality, what becomes truly valuable is what cannot be scaled and cannot be automated. On the contrary, it’s what requires time, focus, and inner work — because fitting an entire world onto a limited canvas is something I consider an act of courage itself. That’s why collecting art is once again becoming the language of people who shape their own position instead of going with the flow.

To collect today means having the courage to have your own taste.

Human presence as scarcity

Recently, during an international summit of tech startup founders, I spoke about Subjektiv. Among people building AI solutions, this always sparks surprise: why, at a time when everyone is racing toward automation, would someone choose art?

After the presentations, a developer from Finland came up to me. He had just shown yet another AI-based product and shared: “You know, Kateryna, I suddenly realized that what I’m doing might not be needed at all.” It was a very precise moment. A person literally creating the “future” felt a lack of meaning. Because in a world where everything is optimized, generated, and predicted, the most important thing disappears — human presence.

Negative capability: the luxury of Not Knowing

The poet John Keats called it negative capability — the ability to remain in uncertainty and mystery without trying to immediately explain everything. Today, that is the true luxury.

Put simply, it’s not “dissecting” a work of art with the scalpel of logic in the very first second, not googling “meaning of…,” but allowing it to be present in your life as it is.

In a world where AI offers billions of “perfect” images, an artwork created by a real person restores space for imagination. The ability to live with a question is what, today, distinguishes people with taste from people who simply consume.

A culture of those who choose

Collecting has long stopped being a performative gesture or simply an investment you lock away. Today it’s about something else: a level of freedom and taste, the ability to choose what is complex, slow, and non-obvious in a world accustomed to the instant and the convenient. An artwork in your space is something you can live with — something you live with, think with, and return to yourself through. That’s why people of real influence — those who make decisions and carry responsibility — have always been involved with art.

So, to me, true luxury is not about accessibility or speed, but the right to depth, your own perspective, and subjectivity in a world where everything is being standardized.