A new publication summarizes studies on the future of visual arts globally and especially in Morocco, titled “The Second National Symposium on Contemporary Plastic and Visual Arts and Future Making.” The studies, supervised by the Moroccan Union of Professional Plastic Artists and supported by the National Museum Foundation and the Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Communication, were scientifically coordinated by Mohamed Cheiker and Ezzedine El Hashimi Idrissi. Among the key points, Saïd Kihya’s research highlights the lack of calls for designers and their exclusion from research and design processes before production and sale, which hinders the improvement of Moroccan products compared to those produced in Turkey and elsewhere. This explains the difficulty in discussing industrial aesthetics due to the scarcity of references and the absence of purely Moroccan-made products except for some local examples that do not yet meet high quality standards.

Designers remain marginalized and unwanted in both industrial and service sectors. Rashid Al-Andalusi concluded that urbanization, construction, and planning pass through architecture and architectural science but this alone is insufficient. The risks of architectural chaos today and future challenges require integrating social sciences such as sociology, psychology, recent history, anthropology, aesthetics, visual arts, and narrative art. There must be an architectural culture parallel to architectural engineering to manage the city’s aesthetics and anticipate the future. Mohamed Cheiker spoke about the “crisis of contemporary art,” which is not only a crisis of creation and innovation or the artists’ ability to renew the image and enrich the concept of art but a crisis particularly related to anything banal that could become art and acquire artistic value. What is considered art does not persist as an aesthetic effect but quickly evaporates or is overtaken by fleeting trends.

The national symposium witnessed the presence and interventions of museum officials, art auctioneers, contemporary art training institutions, plastic artists, critics, academics, urban planners, and architects. Besides topics on arts in light of developments in digital industrial generation technologies, design, and arts in the city, presentations addressed architectural engineering in the “development model,” cinema, aesthetic education in educational policy, and the future of visual arts in Morocco.