The organising function of capitalism is growth. Do whatever it takes to grow. There is a direction—everything else follows. Who benefits from growth, how exactly growth will come, and what are the costs of growth—all those things are downstream impacts of pursuing growth. But if there's a North Star, that's growth. You can ascribe whatever utilitarian purpose you want, but it won't matter if there is no growth.
This, actually, is great. Because if you really think about it, capitalism solves an existential problem: our existence has no inherent meaning. In the absence of meaning, the question of what one is supposed to do leads to despair. The logic of capitalism provides an answer: do everything in pursuit of growth. Simple. It gives you direction, and it's concrete. There are numbers to measure whether growth is happening.
And in this sense, capitalism offers a solution to existential despair for most people. Some will flourish, most will perish—and who knows what happens to the planet—but at least the meaninglessness problem is subsumed by the logic of growth. Growth becomes meaning.
Now, let's segue into art. What's art? What is its purpose? Why does it exist?
One thing we know: unlike capitalism—which is a few hundred years old human construct, an imagination to organise societies—art has existed forever. Think cave paintings from the hunter-gatherer era.
Clearly, something deeper is going on with art. One could argue that creating and consuming art is fundamental to human nature, whereas capitalism is a reverse engineering of human wants and needs into a system's logic.
Art, in that sense, will always be superior to capitalism.
But that comes at a cost: there is no growth-like North Star equivalent for creating art. Art has no purpose—but capitalism does. Art is meaningless.
This is why the pursuit of art leads you to fundamental existential truths—and also existential despair. If you can't accept the indifference of the vast universe to our tiny speck of existence, don't create art. Because you'd go on a hunt to find meaning. You'll ascribe motives to creation that have nothing to do with art. You'll find ways to justify the existence of art in a world which says it doesn't really matter—and sorry, the world is actually right. And crucially, because we live in a society that operates under the logic of capitalistic growth, you'll deceive yourself into believing that art is a source of growth or some purpose of that sort.
There isn't any. Art is meaningless. There is no reason to create it. Art doesn't need to exist. If all the paintings and music and literature vanish tomorrow, human society will still survive—some will flourish, most will perish. It doesn't matter.
But that's exactly the point—and the greatest strength of art. It doesn't need justification to exist. Like life. It's meaningless. Like life.
Because art is life.