“Sense and Sensibility”: Forward-Looking Back The exceptional economy of 2025
The year 2025 can be understood economically not only through its conjunctural indicators, but also through the fertile tension between “sense” and “sensibility”, remarkable, in their distilled, essentialized embodiments, as science and art. By the way, we just celebrated a quarter of a millennium since the birth of Jane Austen, the author-global-phenomenon, who treated and titled, in her debut novel (Sense and Sensibility), the intellect-affection duality, active in each of us and in all our societies. Beyond routine-becoming boom-bust cycles, there is an “exceptional economy”, in which value is not generated linearly, but through ruptures at the level of clichés and taboos. The process is not always happy – the “brain” conceives evil, and the “heart” does not thwart rage. However, science/Truth and art/Beauty – with a quasi-quantum shrewdness – converge in the compass of the Good.
The UN proclaimed 2025 as the “International Year of Quantum Science and Technology”, celebrating the passage of a hundred years in which the “mirage” of the subatomic world (with the hypothetical, at the time, quantum mechanics) transformed into the “miracle” of quantum computing (in which the superposition and inseparability of particles, difficult to comprehend by our Euclidean and Newtonian minds, are converted into a demiurgic, possibly turning into… apocalyptic, computational power). But the already past year was not only about assertive science, but also one of accumulative savvy, among the buzzwords being “cognitive infrastructures”. If OpenAI’s ChatGPT colonized the daily routine, AlphaFold 3, launched by DeepMind, rewrote the rules of structural biology, energizing pharmaceutical research. Progress seems more fluid; and maybe even more accessible.
In fact, 2025 was just another year of “disruptive increments”. The biotech revolution continues: CRISPR-based gene therapy, advanced molecular editing and synthetic biology accelerate drug discovery, personalized treatments and diagnostics. Further on, technologies themselves are becoming increasingly sustainable, equilibrating man-driven-and-nature-based metabolisms: innovations in solid-state batteries, green energy and circular economy waste management are crucial for the planetary ecosystem. Then, hyperconnectivity lives up to its name: the emergence of 6G networks enables immersive and instantaneous AR/VR, pushing the boundaries of the metaverse (but also the risk of conquering otherness at the cost of... alienation). And from above and beyond, the James Webb Space Telescope continues to remould our frontiers of astrophysics and cultural imaginary.
Symmetrically, the art/culture of 2025 continues to function as a laboratory of emotions in a world saturated with technical-scientific rationality. Or rather, both of them co-work in providing existential narratives that influence the way we relate to life, fragility and time. It is solely the force exerted onto human beings’ sensitive strings differs between them. For instance, the Venice Biennale sought to consecrate processual, ecological and post-human art (a bold assumption!), in which the work is no longer a stable object, but a field of body-technology-environment relations. In its own fiefdom, the Cannes Film Festival privileges vulnerability, memory and trauma to the detriment of spectacle/showbiz (does this work?), looking for a mutation of sympathy: art no longer promises escape, but privileges lucid emotion. The same can be noticed in the visual arts, with their assorted economy.
The great Western museums have revised their canons, recovered marginalized artists and ignored cultural geographies, while the 2025 art market, spotted by houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s, has moved from the speculative enthusiasm of digital art to a more rigorous selection, oriented towards lasting cultural value incapsulated in enduring (master)pieces. At the former, “a” Gustav Klimt sold for $205 million; at the latter, “a” Mark Rothko, for £62 million. May the exalted revolutionaries of the Industrial Revolution 4.0’s artistic offshoots be “welcome” with the arrogant analogic anathema: “NFTs, eat your heart out!”. Caught between the old and the new, culture relentlessly acts by eliminating noise and sedimenting meaning, reminding us that, even if outspokenly progressive-, it remains a function of tradition. However, evaluating the tech-intensity of art(s) is a “work-in-progress”.
Seen in this way, through the rationality and feelings mobilized in each, as well as in all of us, within communities (be they organizational or administrative-territorial), nations (by or beyond blood bindings) or human kind, 2025 was not a “good” year in the convenient sense, but it could be counted as a year gained in life. Although we continue to destroy ecosystems, connections and destinies with a gloomy creativity, science and art show that destruction can also be creative. This “exceptional economy” – intensive in sense and sensibility – does not save the world, but illustrates, through virtuous acts and deeds, that humanity remains capable of something other than tireless self-sabotage. If this year will be “value-added-time” in our lives, not subtracted from the rest of them, it is not for it was gentle, but for it reminds us that, between ruin and rebirth, one may find respite – at least for a breather.
