Art

The first Kói Creative photography collection to go on general sale is now available as a limited edition photozine, stocked in Unitom (Stevenson Square, Manchester).

Stand on a hilltop in the Peak District outside Macclesfield and look west, and you see the watermark of a culture whose flood-tide re-invented engineering, music, painting, writing and sport across the world, over a span of two centuries. You can see North-West autodidactism.

There's a particular kind of strategic paralysis that sets in when someone from the board - or a consultant, or a competitor's press release - tells you that digital transformation is coming for your category. You need to create a Luxury Digital strategy. The room gets serious. Roadmaps get built. Budget conversations start. And at some point, probably within eighteen months, you're affixing a fitness tracker to the Milanese-mesh bracelet of a 6-grand watch and calling it inn

Every collecting market eventually produces the same short list of things everyone agrees are worth owning. That list is not arbitrary. It is the output of mimetic desire, corporate portfolio management, and an algorithm that rewards thumbnail legibility over depth. Understanding how the list forms does not mean rejecting it. It does mean you can decide whether you are on the list because you chose to be, or because nobody told you there was a choice.

Rubens designed the major works, established the compositional framework, and reviewed his apprentices' execution. Van Dyck eventually forked the codebase, established his own studio, and surpassed Rubens in the field he chose. Git, the version control system underpinning most of the world's software, formalises exactly this: a master repository, branches, independent lines of work, the ability to merge or to diverge permanently.

For decades the businesses of expertise, craftsmanship and luxury have run on a simple exchange: you paid for authority because authority was grounded in the living presence of a specific person. A marketer. A strategist. A lawyer. Someone who could sit across from you, who had walked through the problem themselves, whose judgement was embodied in a living mind that you could hire and pay. Presence became the marker of truth. Not the accuracy of what they said, but the fact t

Call this the rising floor. Every useful machine absorbs the layer of work it can do better than people. The human contribution does not vanish. It moves upward, into judgement, selection, taste, and ethics, questions a machine cannot answer for you because they are not technical questions at all. That is where AI is heading now, into code, legal drafting, HR policy, marketing copy, the layer of execution that used to define a competent professional.

Wander around the North-West after time away and what jumps out is the architecture of the cotton and silk towns that initiated the Industrial Revolution. Terracotta that was visually resistant to the polluted air, Ruskinian Gothic straight out of the Stones of Venice, Corinthian columns supporting huge sandstone pediments, and above all many tonnes of red bricks.