13th WORLD CONFERENCE on DESIGN and ARTS (WCDA-2025)

The 13th World Conference on Design and Arts (WCDA-2025), themed “On Art, Politics, and Life,” aims to explore the dynamic interplay between art, politics, and life—a theme that has regained relevance in today’s world, echoing the post-World War I motto “Back to Life!” At the heart of the conference lie questions surrounding modernity’s glorification of the new, postmodernism’s challenge to grand narratives, and Lev Kreft’s models of nation-building, autonomy, and avant-garde within the art-politics regime. The conference will revisit the critiques by 20th-century avant-gardes of modernism and aestheticism as being detached from life; the paradoxes of art and politics within modernity; the avant-garde’s revolutionary aspirations; the Frankfurt School’s blurring of boundaries between art and politics; and the postmodern claim that “everything goes.” The discussions will further encompass the impacts of globalization since the 1990s, cultural imperialism, the dethroning of the human subject, the loss of reality, and the emergence of a digital world that transforms everyday life. Today, we face societies alienated by technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, augmented reality, virtual reality, the Internet of Things, and big data—each reshaping values, interactions, and communication networks. In the 1960s, Arthur Danto declared “the end of art,” signaling a new beginning. In the 1990s, Gilles Deleuze responded with the idea that “art is not about communication, but resistance,” while Francis Fukuyama proposed his “end of history” thesis. A decade later, Donald Kuspit argued that contemporary art marked the end of art due to its entanglement with politics and its absorption into everyday life. Around the same period, Jacques Rancière advanced the debate by asserting that art and politics are not fixed, separate realities to be either connected or disconnected, but rather distinct modes of organizing the sensory world, each governed by its own regime of expression. Today, the debate continues—are art and politics still opposing, converging, transforming, or redefining forces in every sphere? Meanwhile, new dimensions introduced by digital culture and the dominance of artificial intelligence have added further complexity to this ongoing discourse. The World Conference on Design and Arts is an international platform that brings together artists, thinkers, scholars, and enthusiasts to share diverse perspectives and engage in critical discussions about the role and impact of art on societal, political, and individual life.