Art for Humans – Know-It-Alls

Art for Humans – Know-It-Alls – by Alexander Cardinale.

Know it all’s, people who seem to think they know just about everything there is to know about art are a pretty common bunch of people you’ll find out about but what’s always seemed to bug me about these people is that they’re seemingly never artists themselves. Art seems to be the one profession that people outside of it are allowed to pretend they know better than the people within said profession. Well, it’s right up there next to the fields of medicine and the culinary arts, These know-it-alls seem to permeate throughout the landscape of art in all forms of it. The biggest music critics are those who can’t play a single note, the people who claim to be the most “well-read” who couldn’t write dialogue if their life depended on it, and the people who claim to truly have an insight into the creative process of painting, or drawing, or animating; cannot draw a stick figure accurately.

Now I’m not trying to gatekeep or anything like that, the people I’m talking about are more likely to be gatekeeping than me. Art is for everyone but in that same breath, everyone includes aggravating people who think they know better than you for some reason. I remember a video that was recommended to me a few years back. The video was posed as a discussion on the differences between traditional cel animation vs modern digital animation. The video looked interesting and so I wanted to watch it, I enjoy learning about almost every form of art that’s out there. Little did I know I was stumbling into just the weirdest argument about animation that I’ve ever heard, the video wasn’t about the differences between the two types of 2D animation rather it was a weird hit piece on digital animation as a whole. The YouTuber proclaimed something along the lines of “weighty animation was only possible with traditional cel animation” and other weird and just wrong things about animation and how it worked. The craziest part though was that this wasn’t the ramblings of a madman with 2 subscribers but instead a fairly good-sized channel with a fairly cleanly edited video. That someone with all their faculties could just be so proudly wrong. Why they vilified modern animation the way they did I do not know but I do know I’ve seen this attitude time and time again.

The most blatantly wrong ideas about art come from these no nothing know it all’s. This isn’t a commonplace argument anymore. Just a while back there would be people who would devalue art that was done digitally, some even decrying it as “not real” because it wasn’t done digitally or at the very least much of it was cheating for things like a mirror and straight-line tools. Thankfully this sentiment is dead if not practically dead by now but the people making these claims weren’t artists, they weren’t traditional artists mad at digital art because it had helpful tools they didn’t have. It was these people who claimed to know “know art” to be some sorta artistic aficionado, it was these people who’d so confidently say such weird and dismissive things about art and the creative process without ever really being an artist themselves.

At the end of the day these kinds of people have always existed, as long as art exists there will always be the non-artist who thinks they are a better judge of an art’s worth than the person who made it just because according to them they’re well-read enough or something of the like.

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