One person sees genius.
Another sees rubbish.
They're looking at the same thing.
For years that made no sense to me. Surely there has to be some objective measure of quality. Surely a great painting is simply... great.
I'm not so sure anymore.
History is littered with books that were rejected, songs that labels refused to release, films that studios didn't understand, and artists who died convinced they had failed.
The uncomfortable truth is that originality often looks like a mistake before it looks like innovation.
If a work fits neatly into what people already understand, it's easy to recognise its value. The more unfamiliar it is, the harder it becomes to judge. We mistake uncertainty for poor quality.
I don't think taste is completely subjective. Craft matters. Experience matters. Some work is undeniably better made than others.
But that's only part of the story.
The other part is that genuinely original work asks something of the viewer. It asks them to meet it halfway. To spend time with it and to tolerate not understanding it immediately.
Some people won't. Others can't stop thinking about it.
That's what fascinates me.
How can the very same painting leave one person cold while another wants to live with it for the rest of their life?
We're not really judging the artwork at all.
We're judging how willing we are to step into unfamiliar territory.
And that's why making art is such a strange pursuit.
You spend months creating something that half the room walks straight past, while the other half can't quite explain why they keep coming back.