The Paradox of Praise
Watch how the compliments fall. A canvas of splattered gesture earns reverence. A field of simplified symbols—a circle that means sun, a line that means horizon—gets laughed off as childish. A 3D-printed trinket is hailed as sleek and modern; a clay figure with fingerprints still visible is called dated, school-project, “dirty.” These are not neutral reactions. They are rehearsed judgments that say less about the work than about what we’ve been trained to admire.
Taste does not float above the world. It lives in the same gravity as money, time, and the pressure to look like you belong. The art we call “serious” often performs distance from the body, from manual labor, from anything too legible or too intimate. The art we dismiss performs the opposite: closeness, touch, recognizability. What we call “good taste” is often just the visible texture of money and distance from mess.
The Cult of Cleanliness
Modern aesthetics inherited an industrial romance with cleanliness—clean not only as in hygienic, but as in controlled, frictionless, engineered to erase evidence of the maker. You can see it in the clean lines of certain modernist temples; you can see it in the glass-and-steel vocabulary of design blogs; you can hear it in the way “minimal” stands in for “mature.” It’s the same ethic that equates “smooth user experience” with virtue, as if absence of resistance were a moral achievement.
By contrast, traditions of touch—clay, collage, textile, papier-mâché—admit the process. They hold onto the bruise and the seam. They accept that making is an embodied thing with breath and sweat and failure baked in. We learned, somewhere along the way, to call sterility progress and touch contamination. It’s a strange education for anyone who has ever been moved to tears by a thumbprint left in glaze.
Cleanliness isn’t simply a preference. It’s a performance of control. It signals that you had the space to keep dust off the surface, the tools to calibrate everything to millimeters, the time to sand down every irregularity. Those are resources, not absolutes. When we pretend otherwise, we’re no longer talking about beauty; we’re talking about access.
When Simplicity Threatens the System
“A child could do that” is an old song with a very specific rhythm: panic. Not panic about children or art. Panic about expertise being invisible. Simplicity terrifies institutions that rely on their ability to tell you what counts as sophisticated. If something plain can be profound, then the proxies of value—tuition, jargon, sanctioned difficulty—lose their grip.
There are two kinds of simplicity. One is the shortcut that avoids skill; the other is the distilled line that arrives after a hundred failed versions. You can feel the difference even if you can’t explain it. But we’re not taught to feel; we’re taught to demonstrate that we understand the right cues. So, a field of forms that requires a catalog essay to decode gets called “rigorous,” while a symbolic image that lands in the gut gets called “naïve.” The first flatters the club’s language. The second bypasses it.
Simplicity is permitted when accompanied by proof of pedigree: clean walls, good lighting, a statement that reads like a grant application. The same shape in a community hall gets called cute or crafty. What changed? Not the shape. The room.
The Hyperreal Exception
There is, however, a style that easily passes the gate: the photocopier miracle, the painstakingly rendered hand, the portrait that looks like a photograph. Hyperrealism performs effort in a way everyone can tally. Hours become visible. Discipline becomes a surface effect you can applaud without asking what it’s for. Nothing is wrong with discipline—most good things require it—but the market loves it because it can be priced on sight.
We’ve mistaken visible effort for depth. A drawing that reproduces pores and metallic reflections is impressive because the metrics are obvious. It reassures collectors and juries that something happened, that someone suffered appropriately. But craft is not a moral proof, and sweat alone doesn’t make meaning. Hyperrealism is beautiful when it reveals attention, care, and intention; it is hollow when it replaces those with a show of endurance.
If you want to see the bias clearly, place a hyperreal drawing next to a perfectly balanced symbol. The first will be praised for patience; the second must explain itself. Both may be equally precise. Only one is allowed to be self-evident.
The Cartoon and the Corporeal
Cartoon-inspired work and semi-realism sit in that hot zone where skill meets vernacular. They are technically competent and emotionally legible, qualities that should be celebrated but often get punished. Why? Because they blur categories that institutions rely on. If something looks like popular culture but carries fine-art rigor, the old labels fall apart. The fallback insult is ready: “tacky.”
The word “cartoon” gets used like a slur when it describes the exact thing that makes images potent: exaggeration, clarity, rhythm, humane distortion. Popular forms are intimate. They come with muscle memory from childhood and margins of notebooks. They belong to everyone. That intimacy makes some people itch. If the boundary between “serious” and “not serious” dissolves, then the ladder they climbed stops looking like the only way up.
We don’t hate cartoons; we hate the idea of something joyful being technically competent. We are suspicious of delight where we were trained to expect austerity. But delight is not an absence of intelligence. It is intelligence moving without a limp.
Material Snobbery and the Myth of Innovation
There’s a reason 3D-printed objects are greeted as the sharp edge of modernity while clay and plaster are dismissed as remedial. Machines hide labor. They hum with the sound of capital well spent. They imply a future where everything is scalable, reproducible, sleek. Clay speaks in breaths and fingerprints. It admits the limit of a body. It suggests that art is not a simulation but an encounter.
Cleanliness reads as investment. Dirt reads as domestic. The first gets to live in the showroom; the second gets relegated to schoolrooms and garage tables. The language is moralized: “innovative” versus “dated,” “design” versus “craft,” “product” versus “project.” But the so-called modern object is often nothing more than a familiar shape in a shinier material. The so-called outdated work might be a problem solved with a single hand-pressed seam.
A 3D printer’s hum is respectable. A potter’s breath isn’t. That sentence looks absurd written down, but it’s embedded in how we distribute attention. The more our tools obscure the maker, the more we are told to admire the result as neutral, efficient, inevitable. The more a piece shows the maker, the more we are told to place it in sentimental categories and move on.
Taste as Infrastructure
It helps to say this plainly: taste is not just preference. It’s a system. It is reinforced by critics who learned to hear one set of chords as “complex” and another as “obvious,” by collectors whose wealth was built in industries that worship polish, by schools whose survival depends on students believing the right kind of difficult will save them. Change the system and the taste will change. Leave the system intact and taste will obediently reproduce it.
That is why the same object can climb categories with nothing but a change of context. A woven piece is “craft” at a fair, “design” in a boutique, “fine art” when a curator writes the right paragraph. The material didn’t change. The price did. The doorframe did. The narrative did.
“The future is smooth” is a sales pitch we keep buying—matte finishes, sans-serif catechisms, infinite scroll. But the future is already textured. Someone keeps sanding it down to make it easier to package.
The Honest Surface
What do I want from a surface? I want it to remember. I want it to keep the record of its becoming, even if that record is refined and quiet. I want to know that something living passed through here and took the time to leave a trace.
Dirt, texture, and irregularity are not anti-beauty. They are the proof of presence. They tell you where the form fought back, where a decision was made and remade, where a hand let something stay imperfect because the alternative would be to lie. Perfection is the lie that lets exploitation masquerade as grace: no budget, no time, no margin, and yet somehow you demand a surface that denies all three.
There is grace in polish, too, when it serves the work rather than erasing it. A well-finished edge can be an act of care. The difference is intention. Are you polishing to clarify the form, or to hide the life? Are you smoothing because the piece asks for it, or because you’re afraid of being accused of having hands?
Autonomy Through Texture
What would it mean to choose an aesthetic that doesn’t apologize for the body? Not a manifesto—just a way of working that honors the conditions of its making. An ethic of autonomy in materials looks like this:
- Visible labor as dignity. Not a spectacle of suffering, but an ordinary, confident admission that time went here, and it mattered.
- Accessibility as sophistication. Legibility is not the enemy of depth. The hardest thing you can do is make something anyone can enter without lowering the ceiling of meaning.
- Mess as clarity. A visible seam tells the truth: the form is held together by decisions. A visible brush stroke says: this carries breath. The point is not to celebrate sloppiness; it is to refuse the erasure of evidence.
When you stop sanding everything down by reflex, you start hearing the real texture of your own voice. The work becomes accountable to its materials instead of to an audience trained to shame fingerprints. You gain room to experiment without the panic of performing maturity for rooms that love sterile proofs.
Clean Hands Don’t Make Better Art
The hierarchy of style—clean over dirty, remote over close, coded over legible—doesn’t protect beauty. It protects comfort. It lets the people who have always sat far from the work keep sitting far from it while claiming a refined view. But the view from far away is not always the truest one. Sometimes it’s just the safest.
Beauty is not the absence of dirt; beauty is the evidence that someone passed through the dirt with attention. The most moving work I know carries its making like a soft bruise: you can see where it pressed against time. You can see where the maker said “enough” not because the calendar demanded it, but because the piece had arrived at itself.
I don’t want the kind of future where everything looks like it was assembled in a room without air. I want the fingerprints left on it. I want the clay under the nails. I want proof that we were here.
Let the work be dirty when it needs to be. Let it be clean when clean is honest. Let it be loud where loud is necessary and quiet where quiet is earned. Let it refuse the shame that tells it to hide its birth. The hands were never the problem. The problem was pretending they didn’t exist.
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