There are two conjectures to this post:

(a) we live in a gadget world
(b) art is dead

We've become the watches we wear. More to the point, we've become phones and iPods, tablets and blackberries, netflix accounts and individualized google homepages. We're technological people and we live digitally. Art is something we've sent away from the public sphere, it might exist in our homes or on our own time or maybe in an entirely unique and personal fashion, but it's social importance (read: in western societies) is being undermined by the bureaucracy of living. But we're edging out the classic forms. The theater is dwindling fast, fewer books are being printed every year and even fewer are being read. The art forms that can be digitalized and transformed into the next world model are the ones thriving. Music, television, and film. Art is moving away from the universal and quickly converting to the individual. We don't feel a joint community overwhelming experience by one amazing theater performance, rather we define ourselves by the particularities of our tastes, by our 15,000 song library and which season of which show we're currently watching.

There's no time for art anymore, as in the acute study of the world, because we're busy creating new worlds, each more heavenly than the last. We're designing cities that float on the ocean, eyes with blue irises for the blind, and farms to be fit inside an 80 story Manhattan skyscraper. And why can't we call these innovations art? Our mastery over the mechanical functioning of this planet has had 150,000 years to reach this point. So why not give to our inventions the same thoughts and feelings and preoccupations we give to our poetry. We can make wall lamps minimalist and highspeed railways self-referential. What about a metaphysical desk chair or post-modern instruments?

If we design an eco-friendly school can't we call that art? It requires creative ability and vision and technical mastery. So why not give scientists credit as the artists of our generation? They give us something we can latch on to as society, a vision of wonder and amazement at nature.

Some of the innovations at Milan furniture fair this week:

lamps made from soap and tomatoes, chairs with seats of grass and silk from silk worms. There were lego bricks you can actually build houses with, recyclable walls and walls covered in grass, collapsible and alterable stairs.

also this week "One team of MIT researchers successfully  harnessed viruses to split molecules of water to create hydrogen fuel, while another team unveiled a stamp-sized water purifying chip that can be lined up in arrays to generate 15 liters of water per hour."

What does it mean to create for creation's sake today?