The watch industry has always liked art.
It simply prefers certain kinds of it.
It knows how to honor restraint. It knows how to honor heritage. It knows how to honor quiet forms of beauty that arrive already approved by tradition.
What it has been far less consistent at doing is recognizing art when it appears through spectacle, theater, cultural symbolism, or public emotion.
That is where Jacob Arabo deserves more serious credit than he is often given.
He is too often discussed through the most superficial vocabulary available. Excess. Celebrity. Visibility. Spectacle.
Those words are not entirely false.
But they are shallow descriptions of a deeper phenomenon.
Because Jacob Arabo’s real contribution is not that he made watches impossible to ignore.
It is that he understood, earlier than most, that a timepiece could carry culture.
That is a very different achievement.
Many brands know how to borrow from culture. Very few know how to translate it.
There is a great difference between placing a reference on an object and turning an entire atmosphere into form.
One is decoration. The other is artistic conversion.
That, in my view, is where Jacob Arabo has been unusually strong.
He has understood that cinema, music, mythology, celebrity, performance, and collective memory can all enter horology without reducing horology to gimmick.
That is not easy to do.
In fact, it usually fails.
Most attempts at cultural relevance in watchmaking feel external. A partnership. A borrowed symbol. A marketing layer placed on top of an object whose inner life remains unchanged.
But at his best, Jacob does something more difficult than reference.
He translates.
He takes a world that already carries emotional force and gives it mechanical presence.
That is why certain watches of his stay in the mind whether one personally wishes to wear them or not.
They are not trying merely to tell time beautifully.
They are trying to carry a world.
They are trying to turn memory into structure. Narrative into motion. Atmosphere into object.
That is not a minor artistic ambition.
And it should be taken seriously.
What also strengthens his position, to me, is that he does not pretend.
Many people may hesitate to call him a watchmaker, and I am not claiming otherwise.
He himself has never needed that borrowed legitimacy.
That is part of why I respect him.
He does not hide behind the false romance of solitary authorship. He does not ask the public to confuse vision with bench execution. He does not collapse the labor, intelligence, and craft of many specialists into a single personal myth.
He stands with the process.
And that matters.
Because luxury is full of people who enjoy the aura of craftsmanship while leaving the actual structure of making conveniently blurred.
Jacob Arabo has always seemed comfortable with a clearer position.
He is not pretending to be the entire workshop.
He is doing something else.
He is doing what serious artists often do.
Seeing the whole. Directing the whole. Holding the emotional and formal vision together strongly enough that others can build it into reality.
That is not a lesser role.
It is a real one.
And the watch industry, in my opinion, is still not fully honest about how selectively it distributes that kind of legitimacy.
This becomes especially visible when one looks at what horology has historically been willing to call art.
Erotic watches, for example, have long been absorbed into the accepted vocabulary of horological artistry. They are treated as playful, historical, collectible, even refined in their own coded way. They are granted cultural permission because time has made them familiar.
I do not object to that.
What interests me is the selectivity.
Because if erotic watchmaking can be admitted into the artistic history of horology, then it becomes difficult to argue that theatricality, cinematic symbolism, or emotionally charged cultural expression somehow fall outside the borders of serious watch art.
That is where the standard begins to look less principled than selective.
One form of excess becomes heritage. Another becomes vulgarity.
One form of performance becomes collectible. Another becomes suspect.
One form of artistic boldness is protected by age. Another is denied legitimacy because it arrives too visibly, too publicly, or too close to modern culture.
That is not always a judgment of quality.
Very often, it is a judgment of comfort.
And that is why Jacob Arabo matters.
He forces the industry to confront the narrowness of its own aesthetic gatekeeping.
He belongs to a tradition of horological expression that is less interested in asking permission from inherited taste.
Not the art of silence.
The art of presence.
Not the art of concealment.
The art of staging.
Not the art that waits to be gradually accepted through age and distance.
The art that arrives fully aware of itself.
This is one reason I find the Godfather line so compelling.
Not because it is restrained. Not because it is trying to satisfy conventional taste. Not because it asks to be admired on the old terms.
But because it understands that a watch can become more than an instrument or an heirloom.
It can become atmosphere.
It can carry memory.
It can perform cultural feeling rather than merely symbolize it.
That is where Jacob Arabo’s achievement becomes difficult to dismiss.
He expanded the expressive territory of the timepiece.
He proved that a watch could be mechanical and theatrical. Symbolic and serious. Culturally charged and horologically meaningful at the same time.
Not every piece must appeal to every collector for that to be true.
Not every bold object deserves automatic praise.
But the broader contribution is real.
Jacob Arabo should not be respected because he fits an old category neatly.
He should be respected because he made that category look smaller than it was pretending to be.
That, to me, is the real point.
Not that he should be called something he is not.
But that he should be recognized for what he is.
An artist who understood that watches could carry culture.
And in a field that still guards legitimacy through a remarkably narrow gate, that may be one of the most important contributions of all.
Jacob Arabo deserves to be read on those terms.
Mohammed Almarwani,
— Mohammed Almarwani, ACIArb, CEO, AllChrono