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

Some quotes are destined for gallery walls, while others feel etched into the underside of a pub table. Duchamp’s declaration belongs firmly to the latter, perhaps a piece of graffiti masquerading as gospel, delivered with a conviction no curator could ever muster. Beneath its profane surface lies a razor-sharp truth: the art world, for all its creators, is overrun by the confidently confused.

We are living in the age of the reflex opinion. To scroll is to judge, to judge is to post, and to post is to perform a certainty we rarely possess. In this environment, art that refuses to explain itself becomes uniquely threatening. It does not plead for approval or tidy itself for critical dissection. It simply exists, and for many, that ambiguity is utterly unbearable.

This is the art that truly unsettles people — not the grotesque or the obscene, which can at least be named and categorised. It is the work that evades language entirely, that lies inert under scrutiny and forces the viewer to question whether they are confronting genius or an elaborate, expensive joke. Such art transcends mere provocation. Its primary function is exposition, turning the gaze back upon the viewer to reveal their own tastes, biases, and intellectual limits.

This is the enduring power of Duchamp’s Fountain. The public’s aversion stems less from the object being a urinal, and more from its function as an uncompromising mirror. What it reflects is our own bewilderment.

Art has always had its heretics, a lineage that includes not only those who make challenging work, but those who dare to appreciate it without demanding a simple explanation. They are the ones who can gaze without an immediate need to categorise, who can sit with confusion as if it were a companion rather than a failing. The difficulty is that we inhabit a culture obsessed with instant comprehension. In such a climate, to “not get it” is seen as a confession of intellectual weakness, or worse, cultural irrelevance. Faced with this pressure, many choose to lash out at the source of their discomfort. They roll their eyes, they mutter accusations of pretension, they declare with the misplaced certainty of a pub quiz champion that “this is not art.”

What if the failure does not reside within the art itself?
What if the limitation rests with us, with our collective inability to sit in the discomfort of not knowing, with our impoverished vocabulary for experiences that defy easy labelling?

The most radical act of criticism might not be to deliver a verdict, but to have the courage to remain silent, to observe, and to allow a work to simply be, in all its glorious, confounding mystery.

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 with the pseudonym “R. Mutt”, it represented far more than a simple porcelain provocation. Duchamp’s intention goal was to scrub away ingrained assumptions rather than stain public sensibilities. He selected an object of universal recognition — a urinal, industrial, anonymous, and functionally invisible — and launched it into the heart of the art establishment like a stone hurled through a stained-glass window. What shattered was not the object's sanctity, but the pervasive illusion that art must conform to a specific set of aesthetic and behavioural rules.

To describe Fountain as controversial is to misunderstand its fundamental nature. Controversy implies a debate over meaning, yet Duchamp offered no meaning. He presented a pure, unadulterated dare, compelling his audience to reckon with their own inability to dismiss the object. For a world accustomed to finding beauty in oil paintings and classical mythologies, this silent challenge was deeply insulting.

This insult, however, was never the final objective. Perversely, it functioned as an invitation to a different kind of engagement. The central trouble remains that when art refuses to explain itself, the public often interprets its silence as a personal attack. Ambiguity is mistaken for elitism; a perceived lack of aesthetic effort is seen as mockery directed at the viewer. Duchamp, in reality, forced the audience to confront their own expectations of what art should accomplish. Faced with this uncomfortable void, many chose to hate the piece rather than admit they had lost their bearings, unsure of how to look at it.

Duchamp’s true brilliance resided in his act of exposing the machinery of artistic elevation, an achievement that overshadowed the urinal's simple transposition. He transformed the gallery into a hall of mirrors where every viewer’s reaction — be it outrage, confusion, or disdain — bounced back with amplified intensity. Fountain became a mirror reflecting individual taste, ingrained snobbery, and an unconscious allegiance to rules its viewers did not even know they were obeying. That kind of unflinching self-confrontation is, for many, an unbearable experience.

And that, frankly, is unbearable.

A very specific kind of fury emerges when one is asked to feel something and encounters only emptiness. People fear not just the foreign, but the sensation of their own intellectual inadequacy. Nothing exposes this fear more acutely than art that refuses to perform. Fountain is the ultimate anti-spectacle, a work defined by its refusal. It offers nothing and in doing so, demands everything. The public’s hatred likely stemmed from its crude origins, yet it was magnified by the work’s ability to leave them utterly alone with their own expectations, the ensuing silence ringing with what felt like mockery.

Over a century later, the hostility persists. In any museum bold enough to display a urinal, an unmade bed, or a banana duct-taped to a wall, one can still hear the same weary chorus: “That’s not art.” The speakers deliver this verdict with the conviction of someone holding a golden, immutable definition of art in their back pocket, as if the category were fixed rather than a fluid, evolving conversation.

But what if this riddle resists solution? What if the state of not-knowing, that peculiar flicker between recognition and radical uncertainty, constitutes the entire point? Duchamp reconfigured art as a form of philosophical prank, a joke whose punchline only lands if you admit you have been complicit in your own setup. Fountain demonstrated that most people would rather feel insulted than feel unsure.

What Fountain proposed, through its silent, ceramic defiance, was a radical redefinition: that art resides more in the encounter than in the object. The focus shifts from the thing on display to the way it actively rearranges one’s thoughts. The gallery, in this light, becomes a psychological testing ground, and the urinal itself emerges as one of the twentieth century’s most faithful, if unconventional, psychotherapists.

In this sense, Fountain did more than merely change the course of art history; it cracked its foundation wide open. A century later, the work continues to leak discomfort all over the polished floors of our cultural institutions. People hated that disruptive presence then. (To be perfectly honest, they still do.)

The Tyranny of Understanding

We have been conditioned, both politely and insistently, to treat understanding as the paramount form of engagement. This extends far beyond art, permeating the very fabric of modern life. From our earliest academic essays, graded on how well we “understood the text," to professional interviews demanding a “demonstration of understanding" for vague corporate values, comprehension has been elevated to a moral virtue. To lack understanding is to fail; to misunderstand borders on indecency.

Cultural institutions have fully succumbed to this pressure. Museum wall labels grow more verbose with each passing year, pre-digesting every visual concept like a cultural parent cutting food for a toddler. Many galleries now furnish QR codes linking to interviews, podcasts, and digital tours, treating the artwork as a mere prop while the “real" meaning is deferred to a voiceover. Contemporary curatorial practice often appears less concerned with provocation than with pre-emption, implicitly stating: “Here is what you are seeing, and here is the correct way to feel about it." Mystery is treated as a spillage, something to be swiftly cleaned before anyone slips.

Consequently, interpretation collapses from an invitation into an obligation. Any work resisting immediate comprehension is deemed not challenging, but rude, arrogant, and elitist. Ambiguity, once the revered domain of poets and prophets, has become an aesthetic quality requiring an apology in the caption beneath the frame.

But what happens when art refuses that demand? When it returns our gaze, inscrutable and unyielding, offering no lesson plan? When it not only declines to be understood but actively and deliberately evades our attempts?

The experience resembles arriving at a dinner party where the guests converse entirely in metaphor and the food is purely symbolic. One smiles politely, sips wine as part of a performance, and laughs in unison with the crowd, desperately trying to time each reaction. Someone remarks that the hors d'oeuvres are a commentary on late capitalism, leaving you uncertain if the statement is earnest or jest. You begin to suspect your own shoes are making too literal a statement. Eventually, you dismiss the entire affair as dreadful, a conclusion stemming less from the event itself and more from your lack of the social grammar required to decode it. Your discomfort seamlessly translates into disdain. The host is pretentious, the art is unserious, the entire spectacle a farce.

Perhaps the true farce is our own — this compulsive need to decode every experience into something palatable, neatly packaged, and easily repeated to fellow guests who are equally uncertain yet pretending otherwise.

A quiet violence underlies this insistence that art must constantly explain itself. It represents a slow, systemic erosion of awe. When we demand that every brushstroke declare its purpose and every installation supply its own footnotes, we risk flattening the very terrain we claim to admire. The artwork devolves into a diagram, and wonder is reduced to a worksheet. Symbolism, once the thrilling province of the imagination, becomes domesticated — its fangs dulled, its mystery leashed.

We like to pretend that understanding enlightens us, that comprehension delivers us closer to truth. Yet some truths resist intellectual grasp, existing only to be felt. Some artworks are not puzzles to be solved, but mirrors to be stared into until something unfamiliar stares back. Sometimes, “not getting it" is the most intimate form of connection available.

There is something sacred, I think, in not knowing. In standing before a piece that defies our instinct to name, explain, and categorise, and allowing it to remain untamed. Allowing it to haunt us with possibility rather than comfort us with clarity.

Not every question requires an answer, and not every silence signifies a lack. Confusion can be a form of communion, the shared hum of two intelligences circling one another in the dark, neither yielding. That fleeting moment just before understanding, when meaning flickers at the periphery of vision but refuses to solidify, holds a resonance that any settled explanation lacks. It is the flirtation before the kiss, the shiver before the storm.

Our cultural reflex, however, is to smother this delicate moment with imposed meaning. We swaddle it in artist statements, historical context, and critical consensus, ensuring no one ever leaves a gallery feeling foolish. Yet perhaps a measure of foolishness is precisely what we require — a intellectual surrender, a willingness to be moved without knowing the reason.

Art owes us nothing, least of all a tidy conclusion. The sublime has never answered questions; its purpose is to ask better, more elemental ones. The ultimate goal may not be understanding at all, but the simple, potent act of witnessing. To stand before the thing, heart off-balance, and allow it to quietly, irrevocably, rearrange something deep within.

Understanding is neat, orderly, and safe. Art, at its very best, is gloriously none of these things.

Categorisation: A Modern Curse

A peculiar form of intellectual smugness accompanies the act of knowing where things belong. This is why supermarkets are arranged as secular temples of order — fruit with fruit, dairy with dairy, snacks temptingly segregated in their own aisle. The system informs us what constitutes breakfast and what qualifies as dessert, fostering a sense of security even as it tricks us into purchasing quinoa that will sit forgotten in a cupboard for weeks.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.

The fundamental problem, however, is our insistence on dragging this rigid, organisational logic into realms where it does not belong. Art, emotion, and identity — anything inherently fluid and resistant — are now forced into neat, prefabricated boxes, as if creativity were merely another shelf to be stocked and labelled for convenience.

When Tracey Emin exhibited My Bed, the public’s unease stemmed from more than its intimate contents: the crumpled sheets, empty bottles, and personal detritus marinated in memory. The deeper disturbance was the work’s categorical defiance. Was it performance? Installation? Autobiographical confession? Therapy masquerading as concept, or concept masquerading as therapy? Critics squirmed like guests at an impromptu intervention. The audience's primary need was categorical rather than interpretive; their central question was “What is this?" rather than “What does this mean?"

Perhaps Emin’s most subversive act was not the display of her intimate mess, but her steadfast refusal to let anyone definitively name it.

Categorisation is, at its core, an act of control. We define in order to contain; we assign genre not to illuminate, but to cage. The common lament, “I don’t know what this is meant to be,” often translates to, “It did not allow me to feel clever.” It failed to fit the mental shelf we constructed for it, and thus it becomes a problem. The artistic puzzle, meant to be savoured, is recast as an intellectual stain to be scrubbed away.

This reflects a distinctly modern anxiety: the fear of the uncategorisable, the hybrid, the work that slips through our cognitive fingers like oil on glass.

We possess a deep-seated desire for our art to behave. Abstract Expressionism is Serious Art, contemplated with furrowed brows. Street art is Edgy, until its museum retrospective transforms it into History. Naïve art is Charming. Digital art still elicits sceptical glances in certain circles, as if pixels are inherently soulless.

But what becomes of a piece that embodies all these qualities at once? What happens when a work refuses to sit obediently in a single box, when it is simultaneously tragic and absurd, polished and spontaneous, sacred and profane?

My Bed © Tracey Emin

The result is a palpable discomfort. In these moments, the human urge to categorise transcends mere failure and descends into panic. This panic, in turn, breeds dismissal. If it cannot be sorted, it must be unserious. If it will not explain itself, it must be nonsense. “It’s just a messy bed.” “It’s just a urinal.” “It’s just…”

The word “just” performs the heavy lifting here. It is a linguistic spell we cast to make inconvenient complexity vanish.

Yet we must ask: why must everything belong somewhere? Why must every creative work carry a categorical passport and visa? We do not walk through a forest demanding each tree justify its botanical classification. We do not sit by the sea and inquire which branch of philosophy it represents. Some phenomena are simply meant to be witnessed, not sorted.

Art, in its most vital state, rarely stays in its designated lane. It merges, collides, and cross-pollinates. It wears a suit with slippers. It dares to mix emotional and aesthetic registers — the mournful with the mundane, the elemental with the ephemeral. In doing so, it forces us, awkwardly and gloriously, to inhabit the in-between.

There is a deeply human quality to this inherent messiness. We are, after all, walking contradictions. We cry at films we have seen a dozen times, yet ignore messages from those who care for us. We fall in love with people who remind us of past heartaches. We claim to be fine when we are emotionally bleeding. Why should the artefacts we create be any tidier than we are?

Categorisation asks that art pick a side. The most compelling works, however, hover at the edges in a way that is liminal, unstable, and impossible to pin down. They resist closure. They refuse to be the good, obedient children of the gallery world. They are feral creations that snarl when you attempt to define them.

I am drawn to the idea that the purpose of art is not to be understood, categorised, or made useful to a theoretical syllabus. Its purpose is to remain essentially wild. To stand in the corner of the cultural room, quietly chuckling at all the labels we desperately try to stick upon it.

And if it’s laughing at us… perhaps we deserve it. At least that is what I think.

Museums as Mausoleums: Institutional Fear of the Unruly

Cultural institutions possess an inherent preference for safety, a tendency that often masquerades as a form of courage. They champion “bold programming" and “challenging work," yet their commitment extends only to risk with a proven historical record — which constitutes no genuine risk whatsoever. It is akin to labelling a rollercoaster dangerous after it has passed ten thousand safety inspections and offers a commemorative magnet for purchase.

Today, museums will gladly display Duchamp’s Fountain, meticulously framed, heavily insured, and lit to cinematic perfection. One must wonder, however, whether they would have accepted it when it was merely an upside-down, unsigned urinal, waiting in a corridor for someone to laugh, cry, or consign it to the rubbish bin. The answer is almost certainly negative. Most museums do not appreciate jokes unless they have already been told the punchline.

An undeniable mausoleum-like quality pervades many of these spaces. The stark white walls, the precisely controlled climate, the hushed reverence broken only by the shuffle of trainers and the occasional, stifled cough. These are tombs. Beautiful and immaculately curated, certainly, but tombs nonetheless. They are places where art goes not to live, but to be remembered.

Like all respectable tombs, they come equipped with a gift shop. A certain irony accompanies the purchase of a mug adorned with a skull or a tote bag emblazoned with a once-radical slogan, now safely aestheticised. One can even acquire a miniature My Bed printed neatly on a tea towel, a punchline Tracey Emin never had to write. The wildness of the original work has been taxidermied — rendered palatable, portable, and preferably priced under thirty pounds.

This is not to dismiss the importance of museums; they matter a great deal. I visit them regularly for new exhibitions and have experienced moments within their walls that fundamentally rearranged my perspective. Yet it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend they operate as sites of radical risk. The Tate now proudly displays works that were once banned or booed, but only after the public outcry has faded into a distant, historicised background hum. They mark the trail with a small plaque explaining why the work once mattered.

In truth, institutions tend to embalm taste rather than shape it. Once the public has finally caught up, they step in to hang the work on a wall, draping it in context like a funeral shroud.

To genuinely support the new is to risk irrelevance, or worse, to risk mockery. No curator wishes to be laughed at over canapés at the next biennale. A strange, almost tragic contradiction emerges: these are spaces intended to hold the future of culture, yet they often flinch when that future arrives too early, too loudly, or wrapped in incomprehensibility.

The art world maintains a complicated relationship with laughter. Laughter is fundamentally unpredictable and democratic. Anyone can laugh at anything, a prospect that terrifies an industry built upon the authority of expert opinion. The underlying fear is that hanging the wrong work — something too new, too messy, too resistant to interpretation — might provoke a giggle. Or worse, it might elicit blank stares of incomprehension.

Consequently, museums wait. They wait for time to soften the edges, for the laughter to subside, and for a critical mass of voices to declare “this matters" loudly and frequently enough that agreement becomes safe. They build their legacy on art that is no longer threatening, a strategy that ensures they are never truly embarrassed, yet also guarantees they are rarely first.

There is a certain elegance to this delay, a quiet dignity in arriving fashionably late to the funeral of something that was once vibrantly alive. Yet, a part of me cannot help but mourn the lost potential. What if more institutions dared to say “yes" before the world had made up its mind? What if they actively welcomed the unclassifiable, the unruly, and the deeply weird? What if they allowed themselves to become part of the risk itself, rather than merely hosting the retrospective?

Until that cultural shift occurs, artists will largely remain figures shouting into the void, hoping to be heard before they are dead, famous, or canonised — whichever comes first.

For all their gleaming white rooms and exquisitely printed catalogues, many museums fail to function as homes for the living. They are sites of sanctioned memory, granting us access to a curated past. Very few, however, offer the present a microphone. And fewer still possess the courage to look into the future and declare, “We do not understand it, but we will hang it anyway."

On Not Getting It (And Getting Over Yourself)

I have watched people stand before a Rothko and mutter, “I could do that." In the very same breath, I have seen those individuals gaze at a sunset and whisper, “Wow," as though nature holds credentials a painter could never possess, as though beauty requires a divine brush to be considered valid.

What they (in most cases) mean, of course, is: “I don’t get it.” But instead of sitting with that discomfort, they project it outward as a grievance. A lack of understanding transforms into an accusation, a social embarrassment twisted into contempt. They demand a refund for a moment that failed to move them on command.

However, art makes no demand for your understanding. It requires only your presence.

I will confess that in my youth, I too struggled to comprehend contemporary art, often aligning with the very critics I now describe. Through ongoing dialogue with those immersed in the art world, I have come to realise that standing before something which does not immediately translate is not a failure of perception, but an invitation to a different kind of engagement. It is perfectly acceptable to acknowledge that not everything communicates in your native dialect. Some works whisper from the corners of consciousness. Some scream in tongues you have not yet learned to recognise. Others refuse language entirely, choosing instead to hum, to echo, to glare. Your role is not to decode them like a crossword puzzle, but to listen.

Of course, I do understand that our education systems condition us to distrust silence. We are taught to interpret, to summarise, and to deliver judgement. School trains you to dissect Shakespeare with a scalpel, then behead a poem with a rigid rubric. Consequently, when art refuses to behave — when it resists summary and returns our gaze — we feel disoriented. We do not know where to place the work, and more unsettlingly, we do not know where to place ourselves.

This disorientation cuts deeply because not understanding feels intensely personal. It threatens the part of us that wishes to appear intelligent, cultured, and in control. It is far easier to declare, “This is bad," than to admit, “I do not know what this is." The former creates an illusion of power; the latter feels like a vulnerable 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 once described her first encounter with an Agnes Martin painting as a feeling of betrayal. She had made the pilgrimage, stood at the prescribed distance, and expected transcendence. And there it was: faint graphite lines on a pale canvas. No crescendo, no grand revelation, only a patient, disciplined quiet. Her initial impulse was to mock its simplicity. Yet she remained, and slowly, something shifted within her. She recognised her anger stemmed from the expectations she had carried into the room — the need to be either dazzled or entertained by a work that held no interest in performing for her.

We often mistake clarity for value, as if something only matters once we can pin it down, explain it to a friend, or summarise it on a placard. Certain artworks resist reduction; they are meant to be reckoned with, felt in the bones, or not at all.

This leads to a crucial realisation: it is perfectly acceptable not to “get it." There is no inherent shame in confusion. In fact, this state can hold something sacred — a flicker of genuine openness, a crack in the imposing wall of your own certainty. The moment you armour yourself with dismissal, labelling the work as nonsense or elitism, you forfeit the encounter entirely.

The true irony is that it requires far greater humility to admit, “I do not understand this," than it does to write something off. The real arrogance lies in the assumption that art owes you clarity. That if you fail to comprehend it, the work itself must be broken. This is not critique; it is entitlement disguised as discernment.

It is easy to forget that art is not a customer service department. It arrives without a manual or a guarantee. It owes you neither an epiphany nor even a flicker of feeling. It might do absolutely nothing for you. And that is acceptable. The least we can do is refrain from punishing the work for our own confusion.

We inhabit a culture that treats not knowing as a personal failing. However, I do believe that there is something gloriously liberating in declaring, “I do not know what this is, but I am present for it. I am willing to learn." This posture makes room for wonder, for surprise, for a soft and receptive awe.

The truth is, most of the most significant aesthetic experiences of my life began with a state of not understanding. They started with confusion, discomfort, even irritation. Then, something shifted not within the art, which remained unchanged, but within me: in how I thought, how I felt, and ultimately, how I saw the world.

Therefore, if you find yourself standing before something strange, something infuriatingly silent or aggressively obtuse, resist the urge to conquer it intellectually. Allow it to speak its own strange language. There is no need for immediate translation. You simply need to be there, fully present.

And perhaps, in doing so, you might just get over yourself.

The Ego Wound of Not Thinking of It First

A difficult truth underpins much of the public scorn directed toward modern art, one I have been circling throughout this discussion: the criticism often reveals less about the artwork and more about the viewer's own bruised intellectual vanity. What presents itself as an aesthetic principle frequently masks a deeper, more personal resentment — envy disguised as discernment, contempt operating as camouflage.

When individuals sneer at Duchamp’s Fountain, that enduring porcelain martyr of twentieth-century art, their underlying sentiment is often, “I could have done that." They are absolutely correct. They could have. The source of their offence, however, is not the urinal itself, but the realisation that someone else possessed the audacity to select it, frame it, and successfully present it as art. They walked past a thousand such objects and saw only plumbing, while Duchamp saw a radical proposition. This recognition of a missed opportunity becomes, for many, an intolerable psychological blow.

This experience carries the quality of a peculiar heartbreak. It is the unsettling awareness that one's own perception has been constrained by convention. We are taught that genius resides in creation, in conjuring form from nothing. Duchamp subverted this myth. He demonstrated that originality can reside in selection and re-contextualisation in the courage of a specific perception, boldly claimed. Therefore in doing so, he revealed that art could exist not only on a canvas or a pedestal, but in the most mundane and functional of spaces.

There is a disruptive violence in such simplicity. It exposes how passively we observe the world and how deeply we rely on established contexts to assign value. A urinal in a bathroom remains invisible, a piece of functional furniture. That same object, placed within the sanctified space of a gallery, becomes a blasphemous act, an uninvited guest that challenges the very rules of the party. The common declaration, “That's not art," typically translates to, “That does not conform to my learned definition of art." It means, “This feels like a trick, and I was not included in the conspiracy."

The true sting, therefore, is rooted in the realisation that someone else thought of it first. It confronts us with the possibility that art might not always be about technical labour, mastered skill, or romantic suffering, but about a moment of sharp, disobedient clarity — a clarity the viewer themselves failed to achieve.

The experience is analogous to watching someone score a winning goal in a game whose rules you never learned. A sudden, existential ache emerges. You did not bring the ball, you did not understand the play, and now the crowd applauds a victory you cannot fully comprehend. A wounded pride, in its defence, instinctively dismisses the entire game as illegitimate.

We frequently conflate personal dislike with a genuine insult. In my experience, the most confronting art does not insult your taste; it challenges your self-image. It suggests you may have overlooked something, that another's vision might be more acute. It implies that, for all your cultivated cleverness, you walked directly past the significance standing plainly before you.

There’s something beautifully democratic, and equally threatening, in that. Anything can be art if you dare to see it that way, and that thought does terrify people sometimes because it levels the field in one breath and sharpens the stakes in the next.

If anything can be art, then the artistic burden shifts decisively from the object to the observer. It’s on you. Your eyes. Your gaze. Your capacity to see differently. If you required the label, the critic, or the institution to grant you permission to see, then perhaps your own perceptual acuity is not as finely tuned as you believed.

Therefore, I would argue that a great deal of modern art functions as a test of ego. It asks a series of difficult questions: Can you relinquish the need to be technically impressed? Can you surrender the compulsion to be categorically right? Can you accommodate the possibility that another's worldview might be more penetrating than your own, not through greater effort, but through a different angle of regard — by looking sideways where you looked straight ahead?

For many, the most corrosive feeling is that of a missed opportunity. It is the quiet, persistent internal whisper stating, “You could have done that." But you did not.

This, perhaps, is the enduring reason a simple urinal from 1917 continues to provoke such visceral anger. It serves as a permanent reminder that the genius on display was rooted in a revolutionary way of seeing. And the most painful part for the scornful viewer is the dawning awareness that they never saw it coming.

The Beauty of Uncertainty

The most resonant artworks I have encountered are those that left me feeling intellectually unmoored, balanced on the edge of understanding. I did not always grasp their intended meaning, or even if intention was the point. This very quality of ambiguity is what allowed them to take root in my memory. They lingered like an unresolved chord, their echo persisting long after I had left the gallery's hushed environment.

It’s a curious thing, this state of productive discomfort presents a curious paradox. We are conditioned to believe that certainty is the ultimate goal — that knowledge equips us for navigation through life. Yet uncertainty, when embraced, reveals itself as the fertile ground where art's most potent seeds germinate. To dwell willingly in this state is an act of intellectual courage. It is an invitation to feel rather than label, to respond intuitively rather than analyse clinically. Within the fog of confusion, we shed the pretence of comprehension and access a more direct, visceral experience.

Art that defies categorisation operates like a lover who communicates in a foreign tongue yet makes you feel profoundly seen. You may never decipher the literal meaning of their words, but their presence conveys an essential truth. This distinction is crucial: art is not always a vessel for comprehension. Often, it is a medium for pure experience. It asks that you allow the work to move through you, rather than attempting to corral its energy into manageable, intellectual boxes. It is about inhaling its essence without feeling compelled to exhale a definitive verdict.

There exists a deep vulnerability in admitting “I do not know", a vulnerability that art requires of us. The work stands before us, indifferent, posing a silent challenge: will you meet me on my own terms, or will you retreat to the comforting, yet sterile, arms of certainty? The artworks that truly transform us, that unsettle our foundations and prompt us to ask “What was that?", invariably reside in this liminal space. Their power derives not from providing answers, but from their resonant silence. The very uncertainty of their meaning becomes the engine of their longevity, ensuring they echo in our minds for days, months, even years after the initial encounter.

Consider your own experience: when were you last truly moved by something you understood completely? Upon reflection, the moments that etch themselves into our consciousness are those shrouded in a degree of mystery, those that exist just beyond the edge of full comprehension. They are the experiences that make us uncomfortable in the most generative way possible.

The sensation is akin to hearing a love song in a language you do not speak. You may not decipher every lyric, yet you feel the emotional weight, the intention, the longing. This feeling is, quite simply, enough. In the realm of art, feeling is the objective. Meaning is often a secondary construct, a convenient shortcut we invent to placate our innate desire for safety and order.

Art, in its highest function, serves as a mirror. However, it does not always reflect the image we expect or desire. Sometimes we gaze into it and confront a stranger. Other times, we encounter a raw, unrefined version of ourselves we did not know existed. The purpose of art transcends providing answers; its greater value lies in the quality of the questions it stirs within us. The beauty of a significant work is not in a fixed, universal meaning, but in its capacity to mean something uniquely different for each individual in every passing moment.

The fundamental problem, then, is never the state of “not getting it." The problem is our assumption that we should. We inhabit a culture that worships certainty as a deity. We crave understanding as a form of security, a legible map for navigating a world that is inherently chaotic and non-linear. Art, in its wisest form, refuses to provide this false comfort. It understands that the most meaningful journeys are those without a fixed destination, where the path itself is the purpose. It recognises that the beauty of a sunset resides not in a scientific analysis of its light spectrum, but in the simple, awe-filled act of witnessing its colours shift and bleed into the horizon.

Therefore, I urge you to relinquish the compulsive need to “get it." Actively embrace the fertile discomfort of not-knowing. It is in this space — where you feel simultaneously lost and found — that the real magic of artistic engagement occurs. This is where art extends its hand and invites you to dance as an equal partner.

Ultimately, this may be the most authentic way to experience art: not as a problem to be solved or a code to be cracked, but as an open invitation to simply be. Be uncertain. Be receptive. Be present. For in these moments of suspended judgement, we encounter something far more elemental and resonant than certainty could ever provide. We encounter a more personal, and often more unsettling, form of truth.

A Closing Note from R. Mutt’s Shadow

Marcel Duchamp’s project was one of fundamental liberation for art, not its destruction. His aim extended beyond mere provocation; he sought to dismantle the suffocating definitions that had constrained artistic expression for centuries. By casting a mass-produced urinal in the role of high art, he performed a conceptual baptism, granting the mundane object a new life and a more expansive set of possibilities. The art world had ossified into an aristocracy of taste, and Duchamp, with the simple, subversive flick of a pseudonym, overturned its table. He shattered the enduring illusion that beauty or even legible meaning constituted the sole criteria by which art should be valued.

Fountain secures its enduring legacy through a relentless, interrogative power that transcends aesthetic considerations. It poses a question the art establishment had long been too timid to voice: Why must beauty be the ultimate objective? Why must artistic expression be so relentlessly neat, pristine, and palatable? Duchamp was less interested in providing answers than in orchestrating an encounter — one that leaves us suspended in the uncomfortable space between our inherited certainties and the vast terrain of what we have yet to comprehend.

In a contemporary climate obsessed with clarity, certainty, and instant commentary, the most radical stance available to us may be the simple admission of our own not-knowing. To surrender the compulsion to immediately define, and to instead declare, “I do not know.” An even more transformative act follows this admission: the commitment to listen. In that deliberate state of uncertainty, when we relinquish the urge to categorise and define, we open ourselves to a far richer engagement. We become receptive not only to art in its most challenging forms, but to life itself, in all its chaotic, unresolved, and magnificent beauty.

S xoxo

Written in London, England

25th March 2025