The Art of Not Getting It: Why People Fear What They Don’t Understand

“Not everyone is an artist, but everyone is a fucking critic.”
— Marcel Duchamp

There are quotes you frame on gallery walls, and then there are the ones you scratch into the underside of a pub table. Duchamp’s words belong to the latter — graffiti masquerading as gospel. And yet, no curator could've said it better. Behind the profanity lies a truth as sharp as broken porcelain: the art world may be full of creators, but it’s even more densely populated with the confidently confused.

We live in an age of reflex opinions. To scroll is to judge, to judge is to tweet, and to tweet is to pretend we’ve always known what we’re talking about. But there’s something uniquely threatening about art that refuses to explain itself. It doesn’t plead to be liked, doesn’t tidy itself up for the critics. It just is… and for many, that’s unbearable.

This is the art people fear. Not the grotesque or the obscene, those at least have a name. No, it’s the work that evades language entirely, that plays dead beneath your gaze and makes you question whether you’re staring at brilliance or a very expensive joke. Art like that doesn’t just provoke, it exposes. Not itself, but you. Your tastes, your biases, your limits of understanding.

And perhaps that’s why people hate Duchamp’s Fountain. Not because it’s a urinal, but because it’s a mirror. And what it reflects isn’t your face — it’s your confusion.

Art has always had its heretics, not only those who make it, but those who dare to love it without explanation, to gaze without categorising, to sit with confusion as though it were a friend, not a threat. But we live in a world obsessed with comprehension. In such a climate, to not get it is a confession of weakness, or worse, irrelevance. So rather than admit confusion, many lash out at the source of their discomfort. They roll their eyes. They mutter about “pretentiousness.” They declare, with the certainty of someone quoting from a pub quiz, that it isn’t art at all.

But what if the problem isn’t the art? What if the problem is us?

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1950 (replica of 1917 original), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Duchamp’s Urinal and the Flush Heard Round the World

When Fountain first appeared in 1917, signed “R. Mutt”, it wasn’t merely a porcelain provocation. It was a test. Not of taste, but of nerve. Duchamp didn’t aim to shock with filth but with form. He didn’t want to stain sensibilities so much as scrub them down to their assumptions. He took an object everyone recognised — a urinal, industrial, anonymous, barely worthy of thought, and flung it into the heart of the art world like a stone through stained glass. What shattered wasn’t the urinal’s sanctity, but the illusion that art had to behave.

To call Fountain controversial is to miss the point entirely. Controversy implies disagreement about meaning. Duchamp gave us no meaning, just a dare. He didn’t ask the audience to admire the object; he asked them to reckon with their inability to dismiss it. And for a world that preferred its beauty in oils and mythologies, that was deeply insulting. Fountain didn’t whisper, “Love me.” It sneered, “Understand me if you can.”

But this wasn’t insult for insult’s sake. It was, perversely, an invitation. The trouble is, when art refuses to explain itself, people often take it as a personal attack. As if ambiguity were elitism, as if a lack of aesthetic effort on the artist’s part meant mockery on ours. But Duchamp didn’t mock the audience — he forced them to confront what they expected art to do for them. And many, facing that uncomfortable silence, decided they hated the piece rather than admit they didn’t know how to look at it.

Duchamp’s brilliance wasn’t in elevating the urinal, but in exposing the machinery of elevation. He turned the gallery into a hall of mirrors, where the viewer’s reactions bounced back with double intensity. Fountain didn’t just look at you — it reflected your taste, your snobbery, your unwillingness to let go of rules you didn’t realise you were obeying. If the urinal had a voice, it wouldn’t have whispered seductions like a painting might. It would have said plainly: “I don’t need to change. You do.”

And that, frankly, is unbearable.

There’s a very specific kind of fury that comes from being asked to feel something and finding yourself empty. People don’t just fear the foreign, they fear feeling unintelligent. And nothing exposes that fear quite like art that doesn’t perform. Fountain doesn’t dance, doesn’t dazzle, doesn’t try. It’s the anti-spectacle. The refusal. It gives nothing and demands everything. People hated it not because it was crude, but because it left them alone with their own expectations. And the silence that followed sounded suspiciously like mockery.

More than a hundred years later, the hostility persists. Walk into almost any museum that dares to show a urinal, a bed, a banana taped to a wall, and you’ll overhear the same weary chorus: “That’s not art.” As if the speaker holds some golden definition locked in their back pocket. As if art were a fixed category, not a fluid conversation. Duchamp never gave us answers, he handed us a riddle and walked off smoking.

But what if the riddle isn’t meant to be solved?

What if the not-knowing, the strange flicker between recognition and uncertainty, is the point? Duchamp turned art into a kind of philosophical prank, one where the punchline is only funny if you admit you’ve been set up. Fountain didn’t trick anyone. It revealed that most people would rather feel insulted than feel unsure.

What Fountain proposed, in its silent, ceramic defiance, was something radical: that art is not the object, but the encounter. Not the thing on display, but the way it rearranges your thoughts. The gallery, then, becomes a psychological testing ground, and the urinal? The most faithful psychotherapist of the twentieth century.

In that sense, Fountain didn’t just change art history, it cracked it open. And it’s still leaking discomfort all over the floor.

And people hated that.

They still do to be honest.

The Tyranny of Understanding

We’ve been groomed, politely and insistently, to treat understanding as the highest form of engagement. Not just in art, but in life. From our earliest essays scored by how well we’ve “understood the text” to job interviews where we must “demonstrate understanding” of whatever vague company culture they’re pretending to have, comprehension has been elevated to a kind of moral virtue. To not understand is to fail. To misunderstand? Almost indecent.

Museums, too, have succumbed to this pressure. Wall labels grow longer every year, attempting to pre-chew every visual idea like a cultural parent cutting up steak for a toddler. Some galleries now offer QR codes linking to interviews, podcasts, digital tours — as if the painting itself were simply a prop, the real art hiding somewhere in a voiceover. Modern curatorial practice often seems less about provocation than pre-emption: “Here is what you are seeing, and here is how you ought to feel.” Mystery is treated like a spillage, best cleaned up before anyone slips.

Interpretation becomes not an invitation, but an obligation. If a work resists easy comprehension, it’s no longer viewed as challenging but as rude. Arrogant. Elitist. Ambiguity, that once-revered aesthetic of poets and prophets, is now something to be apologised for in the caption beneath the frame.

But what happens when art refuses that demand? When it looks back at us, inscrutable, and offers no lesson plan? When it not only declines to be understood but actively evades us?

It’s a bit like arriving at a dinner party where everyone is speaking in metaphor and the food is symbolic. You smile politely, sip your wine like it’s part of a performance, and laugh when the others do, trying to time your reactions just right. Someone mentions the hor d’oeuvres are a comment on late capitalism. You nod, not sure whether they’re joking. You start to suspect your shoes are making too literal a statement. Eventually, you decide the party is dreadful, not because it actually is, but because you weren’t given the social grammar to decode it. Your discomfort translates into disdain. The host is pretentious. The art’s not serious. The whole thing is a farce.

But perhaps the farce is ours, the need to decode everything into something palatable, neatly packaged, easily repeatable over post-party drinks with someone equally unsure but pretending not to be.

There’s a kind of quiet violence in this insistence that art must always explain itself. A slow erosion of awe. When we demand that every brushstroke declare its purpose, every installation write its own footnotes, we risk flattening the very terrain we claim to admire. The work becomes a diagram, and wonder becomes a worksheet. Symbolism, once the thrilling province of the imagination, is domesticated — its fangs dulled, its mystery leashed.

We like to pretend we are enlightened by understanding. That comprehension brings us closer to truth. But some truths aren’t meant to be understood, only felt. Some artworks aren’t puzzles to be solved but mirrors to be stared at until something unfamiliar stares back. And sometimes, not getting it is the most intimate form of connection.

There’s something sacred, I think, in not knowing. In standing before a piece of art that resists all your instincts to name, explain, categorise, and letting it remain untamed. Letting it haunt you not with clarity, but with possibility.

Because not every question needs answering. Not every silence is a lack. Sometimes, confusion is a form of communion, the shared hum of two intelligences circling one another in the dark, neither yielding. That moment just before understanding, when the meaning flickers at the edge of your vision but refuses to solidify, can be more profound than any settled explanation. It’s the flirtation before the kiss. The shiver before the storm.

And yet, our cultural reflex is to smother that moment with meaning. To wrap it up in artist statements, historical context, critical consensus, to ensure that no one ever leaves a gallery feeling foolish. But maybe a little foolishness is precisely what we need. A kind of surrender. A willingness to be moved without knowing why.

Art doesn’t owe us anything, least of all a tidy conclusion. The sublime has never answered questions, it only ever asked better ones. And perhaps the point isn’t to understand at all, but simply to witness, to stand before the thing, mouth slightly ajar, heart off balance, and let it rearrange something inside you.

Understanding is neat. Art, at its best, is not.

Categorisation: A Modern Curse

There’s a special kind of smugness in knowing where things belong. It’s why supermarkets are laid out like secular temples — fruit with fruit, dairy with dairy, snacks down a tempting aisle all of their own. You know what’s for breakfast and what’s for dessert. The system makes us feel safe, even when it tricks us into buying quinoa we’ll never cook.

But the problem is, we’ve dragged that same logic into places it doesn’t belong. Art, for instance. Emotion. Identity. Anything fluid and resistant is now forced into neat little boxes, as if creativity were just another shelf to be stocked and labelled.

When Tracey Emin displayed My Bed, it wasn’t just the contents of the bed that unsettled people, the crumpled sheets, the empty bottles, the underwear marinated in memory. It was the fact that no one could quite decide where to shelve it. Was it performance? Installation? Was it autobiographical art? Therapy disguised as concept? Concept disguised as therapy? The critics squirmed like guests at an impromptu intervention. People didn’t just want to know what it meant. They wanted to know what it was.

And perhaps the most subversive thing Emin did wasn’t showing her intimate mess, but refusing to let anyone name it.

Because categorisation is, at heart, an act of control. We define in order to contain. We assign genre not to clarify, but to cage. When someone says “I don’t know what this is meant to be,” what they often mean is, “It didn’t let me feel clever.” It didn’t fit the shelf I built for it. And so it becomes a problem. Not a puzzle to be enjoyed, but a stain to be scrubbed.

It’s a kind of modern anxiety: the fear of the uncategorisable. Of the hybrid. Of the work that slips through the fingers like oil on glass.

There’s a reason we want our art to behave. Abstract expressionism is serious — the sort of thing one contemplates with furrowed brows and low murmurs. Street art is edgy, a bit dangerous, until it gets a museum retrospective and suddenly becomes historic. Naïve art is charming. Digital art still gets raised eyebrows in some corners, as if pixels aren’t allowed to have soul.

But what happens when a piece is all of these at once? What happens when something refuses to sit obediently in one box? When it is at once tragic and silly, polished and spontaneous, sacred and profane?

My Bed © Tracey Emin

People get fidgety. The urge to categorise doesn’t just fail, it panics. And in that panic, comes dismissal. If it can’t be sorted, it must be unserious. If it won’t explain itself, it must be nonsense. “It’s just a messy bed.” “It’s just a urinal.” “It’s just…”

The “just” is always doing the heavy lifting. “Just” is a spell we cast to make complexity disappear.

But why must everything belong somewhere? Why must every work carry a passport and a visa? We don’t walk through forests demanding each tree justify its classification. We don’t sit by the sea and ask which branch of philosophy it falls under. Some things are simply meant to be witnessed, not sorted.

Art, at its most alive, rarely stays in its lane. It merges and collides. It wears a suit and slippers. It dares to mix registers — the mournful and the mundane, the profound and the petty. And it forces us, awkwardly and gloriously, to sit in the in-between.

There’s something deeply human in that messiness. After all, we’re contradictory creatures. We cry at films we’ve seen ten times, then ignore texts from people who care about us. We fall in love with people who remind us of people we said we’d never fall for again. We say “I’m fine” when we’re bleeding. Why should the things we make be any tidier?

Categorisation asks art to pick a side. But the most interesting works hover at the edge — liminal, unstable, hard to pin down. They resist closure. They refuse to be good little boys and girls of the gallery world. They are feral. They snarl when you try to define them. And maybe that’s the point.

Because maybe the job of art isn’t to be understood or categorised or made useful to some theoretical syllabus. Maybe its job is to remain wild. To stand in the corner of the cultural room, smirking at all the labels we try to stick on it.

And if it’s laughing at us… well. Perhaps we deserve it.

Museums as Mausoleums: Institutional Fear of the Unruly

Institutions like safety. It’s their favourite flavour of courage. They speak of “bold programming” and “challenging work” but prefer risk with a proven track record, which of course, is no risk at all. It's like calling a rollercoaster dangerous after it’s passed ten thousand safety tests and comes with a commemorative magnet.

They’ll gladly house Duchamp’s Fountain now, framed, insured, lit to cinematic perfection — but would they have accepted it when it was just a urinal, upside down and unsigned, waiting in a corridor for someone to laugh or cry or throw it out? Of course not. Museums don’t like jokes unless they’ve already heard the punchline.

There is something undeniably mausoleum-like about many museums. The white walls, the careful climate control, the hush of reverence broken only by the shuffle of trainers and the occasional cough. These are not wild spaces. These are tombs. Beautiful ones. Immaculately curated ones. But tombs nonetheless, places where art goes not to live, but to be remembered.

And like all good tombs, they come with gifts. There is a certain irony in buying a mug with a skull on it, or a tote bag emblazoned with a once-radical quote, now safely aestheticised. You can even buy a miniature My Bed, neatly printed on a tea towel, which feels like the punchline Tracey Emin never had to write. The wildness of the work has been taxidermied — made palatable, portable, and preferably under £30.

That’s not to say museums don’t matter. They do. I’ve had moments in them that rearranged me. But it would be dishonest to pretend they are sites of radical risk. The Tate now displays works that were once banned or booed. But only once the booing has become background noise, distant enough to be historic, safe enough to display with a little plaque explaining why it mattered. They do not lead the charge. They mark the trail.

In truth, institutions don’t shape taste so much as they embalm it. Once the public has caught up, they step in and hang the work on a wall, draped in context like a funeral shroud. “This was once dangerous,” they whisper, “but don’t worry… it’s been de-fanged.”

To genuinely support the new is to risk irrelevance. Or worse: to risk mockery. And no curator wants to be laughed at over canapés at the next biennale. There’s a strange, almost tragic contradiction here: these are spaces meant to hold the future of culture, yet they often flinch when the future arrives too early, too loud, or too incomprehensible.

The art world has a complicated relationship with laughter. Laughter is too unpredictable. Too democratic. Anyone can laugh, and at anything. And that terrifies an industry built on expert opinion. There’s a fear that if you hang the wrong work — something too new, too messy, too resistant to interpretation — someone might giggle. Or worse: someone might not understand it. And then what?

So museums wait. They wait until time has softened the edges. Until the laughter stops. Until someone else has said “this matters” loud enough, often enough, that it becomes safe to agree. They build their legacy on what is no longer threatening. In doing so, they ensure they are never truly embarrassed. But they also ensure they are rarely first.

There’s a kind of elegance to this delay, I suppose. A quiet dignity in arriving fashionably late to the funeral of something once alive. But part of me mourns what could be. What if more institutions said yes before the world had made up its mind? What if they welcomed the unclassifiable, the unruly, the deeply weird? What if they allowed themselves to be part of the risk, not just the retrospective?

Until then, artists are often left shouting into the void, hoping someone hears them before they’re dead, or famous, or canonised… whichever comes first.

Because for all the gleaming white rooms and gorgeously printed catalogues, many museums are not homes for the living. They are sites of sanctioned memory. They give us access to the past. But very few give the present a microphone.

And fewer still are brave enough to look into the future and say: “We don’t get it, but we’ll hang it anyway.”

On Not Getting It (And Getting Over Yourself)

I’ve seen people stand in front of a Rothko — silent blocks of colour, vibrating like held breath, and mutter, “I could do that.” And I’ve seen those same people, in the very same breath, stare at a sunset and whisper, “Wow.” As though God has better credentials than a painter. As though beauty needs a brush to be valid.

What they mean, of course, is: “I don’t get it.” But instead of sitting with that discomfort, they hurl it back like a complaint. Not understanding becomes an accusation, a kind of social embarrassment twisted into contempt. They demand a refund for the moment they weren’t moved.

But art doesn’t require your understanding. It requires your presence.

To stand before something that doesn’t immediately translate is not a failure, it’s an invitation. Not everything speaks in your dialect. Some works whisper in the corners of consciousness. Some scream in tongues you haven't learned to recognise. Some don’t speak at all: they hum, they echo, they glare. Your job isn’t to decode them like crossword clues. Your job is to listen.

But we are not taught to listen to silence. We are taught to interpret, to summarise, to pass judgement. School trains you to analyse Shakespeare with a scalpel, then behead a poem with a rubric. So when art doesn’t behave — when it resists summary, when it stares back — we don’t know where to put it. And worse: we don’t know where to put ourselves.

Because not understanding something is deeply personal. It threatens the part of us that wants to appear intelligent, cultured, in control. It’s much easier to say “This is bad” than to say “I don’t know what this is.” The former feels like power. The latter feels like exposure.

Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1965. © Estate of Agnes Martin/DACS, London, 2015. Published in Agnes Martin, a monograph from Distributed Art Publishers.

A friend of mine tells me about the first time she stood in front of an Agnes Martin painting, she felt... betrayed. She had made the pilgrimage, stood where she was supposed to stand, expected transcendence. And there it was: faint graphite lines on pale canvas. That was it. That was the work. No crescendo. No revelation. Just a kind of patient, disciplined quiet.

She wanted to storm out. She wanted to mock it. But she didn’t. She stood there. And slowly, something shifted. Not in the painting, it hadn’t moved, but in herself. She realised she was angry because she had brought all this expectation into the room. She had demanded to be dazzled. To be entertained. But the work had no interest in entertaining her. It was not a magician. It was a monk. And it required her humility, not her applause.

We mistake clarity for value. As if something only matters if we can pin it down, explain it to a friend, summarise it on a placard. But some art is not meant to be reduced — it’s meant to be reckoned with. Felt in the bones. Or not at all.

And that’s the other thing: it’s fine not to get it. It really is. There’s no shame in confusion. In fact, there’s something sacred in it: a flicker of real openness, a crack in the wall of your certainty. But the moment you armour up, dismiss it as nonsense or elitism, you’ve missed the point entirely.

Because here’s the real irony: it takes far more humility to say “I don’t get it” than to write something off. The real arrogance lies in assuming that art owes you clarity, that if you don’t understand it, it must be broken. That’s not critique. That’s entitlement in a clever coat.

Art isn’t customer service. It doesn’t come with a manual or a guarantee. It doesn’t owe you an epiphany or even a flicker of feeling. It might do nothing for you. And that’s fine. But the least you can do is not punish it for your confusion.

We live in a culture where not knowing is treated like a personal failing. But there is something gloriously freeing in admitting, “I don’t know what this is, but I’m here for it.” It makes room for wonder. For surprise. For a kind of soft awe.

Because the truth is, most of the best things I’ve ever felt began with not understanding. With confusion, discomfort, even irritation. And then something shifted. Not in the art, but in me.

So if you find yourself standing in front of something strange, something infuriatingly silent or aggressively obtuse, don’t rush to conquer it. Let it speak its own strange language. You don’t need to translate. You just need to be there.

And maybe get over yourself.

The Ego Wound of Not Thinking of It First

Here’s the dirty secret nobody likes to admit: much of the scorn flung at modern art isn’t about the art. It’s about the viewer. Specifically, their bruised ego. It’s envy, dressed up as aesthetic principle. Contempt as camouflage.

When people sneer at Duchamp’s Fountain — that poor, porcelain martyr of the twentieth century — what they’re really saying is, “I could’ve done that.” And they’re right. They could have. But they didn’t. And that, for many, is intolerable. It’s not the urinal that offends. It’s the fact someone had the audacity to frame it, sign it, and get away with it.

It’s a peculiar kind of heartbreak, isn’t it? To realise you walked past a thousand urinals in your life and never once saw art staring back. That you saw plumbing, while someone else saw provocation. That you thought art was supposed to live on a canvas or a pedestal, and someone else dared to put it where you piss.

Genius, we are taught, is about creation. About conjuring something from nothing. But Duchamp didn’t create the urinal. He chose it. He relocated it. He renamed it. And in doing so, he exposed the myth that originality must always be invention. Sometimes it’s simply perception, and the courage to claim it.

There’s a strange violence in that kind of simplicity. It reveals how rarely we actually look at the world. How dependent we are on context to tell us what matters. How helpless we become without labels. A urinal in a bathroom is invisible. A urinal in a gallery is blasphemy. Not because it changed, but because it dared to arrive uninvited into a sanctified space.

When someone says, “That’s not art,” they often mean, “That’s not how I was taught to recognise art.” They mean, “This isn’t dressed in the correct ritual.” They mean, “This feels like a trick, and I wasn’t in on it.”

And that’s the real sting, isn’t it? Not that someone “made” the piece, but that someone else thought of it first. That art might not be about labour or skill or suffering, but about a moment of sharp, disobedient clarity — and that the viewer wasn’t the one to have it.

It’s like watching someone win a game you didn’t realise you were playing. A sudden, existential ache. You didn’t bring the ball, you didn’t know the rules, and now everyone’s clapping for a goal you didn’t see being scored. Your pride, naturally, insists the game was stupid to begin with.

We often confuse dislike with insult. But the most confronting art doesn’t insult your taste, it insults your self-image. It suggests you missed something. That someone else’s eyes are sharper. That you, for all your cleverness, walked right past the point.

There’s something beautifully democratic, and equally threatening, in that. Duchamp’s Fountain didn’t ask for reverence. It didn’t rely on virtuosity. It said: Look again. It said: Anything can be art if you dare to see it that way. And that terrifies people. Because it levels the field in one breath and sharpens the stakes in the next.

If anything can be art, then the pressure is no longer on the object. It’s on you. Your eyes. Your gaze. Your capacity to see differently. And if you didn’t see it — if you needed the label, the critic, the institution — then perhaps you’re not as attuned as you thought.

So much of modern art is an ego test. It asks: can you let go of needing to be impressed? Can you stop needing to be right? Can you sit with the possibility that someone else’s view of the world might be sharper than yours, not because they worked harder, but because they looked sideways instead of straight on?

Duchamp didn’t offer a masterpiece. He offered a mirror. And not everyone likes what they see in it.

Because the ugliest feeling in the world isn’t confusion. It’s missed opportunity. That quiet little voice whispering, “You could’ve done that.” But didn’t.

And maybe that’s why so many people are still angry at a urinal from 1917. Because it reminds them that the genius wasn’t about doing. It was about seeing.

And they never saw it coming.

The Beauty of Uncertainty

Some of the most powerful works I’ve seen left me unsettled, unsure. I didn’t know what they meant, or if they meant anything at all. And that’s precisely why they stayed with me. They didn’t hand me an answer. They didn’t even offer me a question, or at least not one I could recognise. Instead, they lingered like an unfinished sentence, hanging in the air long after the gallery lights flickered off.

It’s a curious thing, this discomfort. We think we want certainty, don’t we? That the more we know, the better equipped we are. But uncertainty, when allowed to flourish, turns out to be the very soil where art’s most potent seeds grow. To dwell in uncertainty is an act of bravery. To feel, rather than label. To respond, rather than analyse. Because in the fog of confusion, there is something raw, something that allows us to strip away all the pretences of understanding and simply experience.

Art that resists definition is like a lover who never speaks your language but still manages to make you feel understood. You might never comprehend their words, but somehow, their presence speaks volumes. And that, I think, is the crux of the matter: art isn’t always about comprehension. Sometimes, it’s about experience. It’s about letting the work move through you, instead of trying to corral it into neat, manageable boxes. It’s about breathing it in without needing to exhale a verdict.

There’s a vulnerability in not knowing. A vulnerability that many of us fear, yet art demands it of us. It stands there, indifferent, asking: Will you face me as I am, or will you run to the comforting arms of certainty? The truly great works — the ones that change us, shake us, make us ask, "What was that?" — often sit on the edge of not knowing. Their power lies not in answers, but in the absence of them. The uncertainty of their meaning becomes the very reason they continue to echo in our minds, long after we leave the gallery, long after the moment has passed.

Think about it: when was the last time you felt truly moved by something that you understood completely? If we’re being honest, the moments that linger in memory are those that leave us wondering, those that exist just beyond the edge of comprehension. The ones that make us uncomfortable in the best possible way.

It’s like stumbling upon an old love letter, one written in a language you don’t quite speak. You can’t decipher all the words, but you get enough to feel the weight of the emotion, the intention, the longing. And that’s enough. Because in art, feeling is the point. Meaning, on the other hand, is an illusion. It’s just a convenient shortcut we use to make ourselves feel safer.

Art, at its best, is a mirror. But mirrors don’t always reflect what we expect to see. Sometimes, you look in and see a stranger. Sometimes, you look in and see a version of yourself you didn’t know was there: raw, unrefined, unsure. Sometimes, you don’t even recognise the face staring back. And that's okay. Because art isn’t about providing answers. It’s about the questions it stirs within you. The beauty of art isn’t in finding what it means, but in allowing it to mean something different for everyone, for every moment.

The problem is never not getting it. The problem is assuming you should. We live in a world where certainty is worshipped like a god. We crave understanding as though it will grant us some kind of security, a legible map for navigating a world that, frankly, is anything but linear. But art, in its purest form, knows better than to give us that map. It knows that the best journeys are the ones where the destination is always shifting, always elusive. It knows that the beauty of a sunset doesn’t lie in understanding its colours, but in simply watching them shift and bleed into the sky.

So, let go of the need to “get it”. Embrace the discomfort of uncertainty, because in that space, that space where you feel both lost and found, is where the real magic happens. It’s where art invites you to dance with it, not as a spectator, but as a partner.

In the end, maybe that’s the most honest way to experience art: not as an equation to solve, not as a puzzle to piece together, but as an invitation to simply be. Be uncertain. Be uncomfortable. Be present. Because in those moments of not knowing, we encounter something far more profound than certainty could ever offer, we encounter truth.

A Closing Note from R. Mutt’s Shadow

Marcel Duchamp didn’t want to destroy art. He wanted to liberate it. He wasn’t setting out to provoke for the sake of provocation, but to rip apart the suffocating definitions that art had been bound by for centuries. By casting a urinal in the role of high art, he wasn’t making a mockery of the concept, he was giving it a new breath. The art world had become an aristocracy of taste, and Duchamp, with a simple flick of a signature, flipped the table. He shattered the illusion that beauty, or even meaning, was the measure by which art should be judged.

Fountain endures not because it’s beautiful — far from it. It endures because it asks us the one question no one was brave enough to ask before: Why do you think beauty is the point? Why does everything need to be so damn neat, so pristine, so palatable? Duchamp wasn’t interested in making people comfortable; he was interested in making them feel. He wanted to leave us in the uncomfortable space between what we thought we knew and what we couldn’t quite comprehend.

In a world that seems obsessed with clarity, certainty, and constant commentary, the most radical act might just be to admit when we don’t understand. To throw up our hands in surrender and say, “I don’t know.” But perhaps even more radical is what follows: “…but I’m listening.” In that moment of uncertainty, when we abandon the need to define and categorise, we open ourselves to something far richer — to art, yes, but also to life, in all its chaotic, messy beauty.

S xoxo

Written in London, England

25th March 2025