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Art Talk – Exclusivity

Written by Staff on May 21, 2024

There’s a feeling you’ll soon catch onto when being within the art world, you can even feel it just by looking at the art world from the outside and it’s the feeling of exclusivity. As an artist myself I’ve encountered it more times than I can care to remember and I’m sure even the casual viewer can recall a time when they caught a whiff of that pungent self-importance that you can often see wafting off the art world like a thick fog.

This overwhelming sense of judgment and pseudo-intellectualism that echoes throughout the painting hung halls of galleries is most people’s biggest obstacle when either trying to navigate the art world or even just appreciate art for the sake of appreciation. Whether it be another artist judging you for not fitting into the mold of what they consider “real art” or another person appreciating the art who just seems to “get it” more than you do there’s endless opportunities for exclusivity to intrude on your artistic experience, in most other spaces and subcultures this haughty mind set is more than often deterred by the average Joe who wishes to enjoy what they like as deeply as they’d like to but in the art world this “I’m better than you” attitude is not only commonplace but is encouraged to continue by many if not most.

This is not to put down or demand that people who want to make deep and thought-provoking art and those who wish to discuss these works in-depth must step down and look at everything from a surface level. This is more an argument for coexistence, a cry for people to just calm down and let people “not get” a painting. Today’s current brand of snob comes from the era of post-modern art, an era defined by throwing out traditional artistic conventions and embracing abstraction and experimentation. This type of art has moved on from its formation as a counterculture movement and has become what most of the art world would deem as “good art”, it has become standard. Art made simply to render reality or a fictionalized version of it using artistic skills to create a detailed piece of work is now considered “bad art” because it isn’t meant to stir some deep emotion but rather is meant to be appreciated on an aesthetic level.

Although it is important to mention that before now it was very much the other way around. The snobs were the ones who rendered real landscapes and the experimenters were the ones making “bad art”. It is simply another case of the more things change the more they stay the same, what the snobs like may have changed but they’re still snobs. This attitude extends throughout all mediums of art of course and is not simply relegated to the fine arts. Movies look down upon TV, graphic novels look down upon comic books, cinematography looks down upon animation, and so on and so forth.

Art for the sake of art is a term often thrown around within the art world and especially by those higher within but someone cannot believe in art for the sake of art and still look down upon someone who “doesn’t get it” or an artistic making what you consider “bad art” in reality nobody makes truly “bad art” they just make art that someone else doesn’t like but that’s fine, that’s okay. It doesn’t make it bad, it just makes it different and nobody needs to put someone’s art or the art they like down to a lower level just because it doesn’t tickle their fancy. If you want more people to get into art just calm down and stop the exclusivity.