Why Popular Art Endures the Institutional Gaze

The Scaffolding of Snobbery: Why "Popular" Art Endures the Institutional Gaze

I often receive comments on social media that my work is just ordinary, populist and for any creative willing to put their head above the parapet, you might expect a few throwaway comments. However, I am noticing a pattern, a more sinister targeted vein is emerging. Alongside both public and private comments, I have received messages from individuals often conspicuously signing off with their academic pedigree such as "MA RCA", who feel qualified to diagnose my intent without ever speaking to me.

Having navigated the closed circuit of these institutions for years myself, as a student, a technician and a lecturer. I recognise this dialect for what it is, a systemic devaluing of accessible aesthetics rooted in a desperate need for intellectual acceptance. It is a pulp fiction bias that looks down on the popular while encircling the educated art of the elite. They will often speak at me, not to me. They suggest that unless I follow a creative journey like that prescribed by their institutional lineage, I am infringing on a collective intellectual property. It is the ultimate hubris of such a defined closed circuit, the belief that a degree grants one the power and the right to litigate the visual language of others.

The Pulp Precedent

This snobbery is a historical echo. Consider William Shakespeare, now the cornerstone of the academic canon. In his time, he was mocked by the university wits as an upstart crow, a populist writer without a degree who dared to mix high philosophy with pulp thrills for the uneducated masses. The institution only embraced him once they could wrap his work in enough intellectual scaffolding to claim it as their own. We see the same pattern with the Impressionists, once mocked as wallpaper painters and Jazz musicians, whose devil's music is now the subject of university doctorates.

The pattern remains identical, the university wits of our era first dismissed film and now games as commercial rot. Now that these mediums dominate the culture, academics are rushing to build intellectual scaffolding around them. They take the pulp like a Hitchcock thriller or a Hideo Kojima game and claim that the creator was actually a hidden philosopher whose work can only be truly understood through their specific theoretical lens.

The Mechanical Cheat: From Moore to AI

The most vitriolic snobbery is reserved for those who use new technologies to lower the barrier to entry. Today, the target is AI and digital art, but the pattern is familiar and persistent. The argument is that because the machine assists, the artist's soul is missing, as if assistance automatically cancels intention and insight.

This is the exact ghost that haunted Henry Moore. When Moore moved from direct carving to using industrial foundries to scale his maquettes, purists were horrified and vocal. They whispered that he was industrialising art, relying on mechanical methods to achieve a scale he hadn't earned with his own sweat. Yet Moore understood that the tool is not the artist and that the idea, conception and vision remain king. Whether it is a bronze foundry in 1940 or an AI algorithm in 2026, the institution too often equates manual suffering with artistic value.

The sin of success makes matters worse, when an artist like Moore becomes one of the wealthiest in the world, the institution turns against them. The "No More Moore" slogans of my youth weren't just about aesthetics, they were about the resentment of an artist who no longer needed the academy's permission to survive. In the art school monoculture, if the ordinary public likes a work enough to pay for it, the elite frequently decides it must be pandering.

The Silicon Frontier: Digital Art as the New Taboo

Today, the target is the digital interface and AI. These tools represent the ultimate democratisation of the vision, opening creative possibility to a far wider audience and enabling new forms of collaboration and experimentation. Just as the camera was once dismissed as a mechanical cheat, digital tools are too often labelled not real art because they lower the barrier to entry and upset established hierarchies and traditional measures of expertise. If a digital upstart can resonate with the public without the blessing of the academy, the gatekeepers lose their relevance and authority. They fear the ordinary precisely because they can no longer control, commodify or profit from it in the same predictable ways.

The Nerve to Create

This journal entry is an attempt to dissect this friction. It is a defence of the ordinary and popular and a call to recognise that art's primary function, communication, should not be its greatest perceived flaw. From the pulp plays of Shakespeare, to the industrial methods of Henry Moore, history shows that the populist of today is often the masterpiece of tomorrow.

To be creative at any level requires a giant leap of faith. It takes nerve to speak openly and directly to a culture. It takes nerve to endure the diagnoses of strangers who hide behind their credentials. If that makes anyone “ordinary” then I stand in solidarity and wear that label with pride. I would rather be understood by the many than be recognised only by a committee, history proves it is not written by the gatekeepers, it resonates with the stories of those who had the nerve to jump.