You Don't Have to Like Important Art

There's a real complaint going around about a certain aesthetic label right now, if everything gets called chic, nothing actually is. The label stopped meaning anything the moment it stopped choosing.

That's not really about the label. It's about taste itself. Taste requires discernment. It requires actually choosing one thing over another, not just accepting whatever a trend, an algorithm, a critic, or a museum tells you to like.

Understanding something is not the same as liking it

Take Andy Warhol. The real, art-historical arguments around his work are genuinely interesting, Pop Art's relationship to mass production, celebrity, repetition, and the collapse between what culture calls high and low. Understanding all of that doesn't make the work move me more. I can hold both of those things at once, real respect for what the work is doing, and a real, honest lack of enthusiasm for looking at it.

The same tension shows up with conceptual work, a banana taped to a wall, say. The point usually isn't the object itself, it's the questions the piece raises about authorship, spectacle, and what an institution is willing to call art. I can follow that argument completely and still walk away unmoved.

There's a Spanish word that captures the feeling better than any English one does, burla. Not quite mockery, not quite satire, closer to the sense that something is testing how far a definition can stretch before someone finally says, enough. That reaction is real too, worth naming honestly rather than pretending it isn't there.

None of this is an argument against any particular artist or movement. Plenty of people find real, genuine meaning in exactly this kind of work, and that's a legitimate response too. The actual question worth asking is simpler than picking a side.

Can you understand a work completely and still not like it

Yes. And that might be part of what developing real taste actually looks like.

Art education at its best doesn't train anyone to admire the canon obediently. It gives someone the vocabulary, the history, the context, and eventually the confidence to look carefully and arrive at their own judgment, whatever that judgment turns out to be.

What this actually means for collecting

Collectors hear a lot of noise about what's important, investment-worthy, emerging, or having a moment. Social media adds its own layer now too, an algorithm can make thousands of people want the same aesthetic overnight, whether or not any of them actually chose it.

Collecting works better when it's more personal than that. Look longer. Learn about the artist. Understand the process, the materials, the intention. Hear what the critics and the galleries have to say. Then decide for yourself.

Sometimes that education changes your mind entirely, one of the genuinely great parts of learning to look at art closely. Sometimes it doesn't, and you understand a piece completely and still don't want it on your wall. Both outcomes are real, and both are fine.

A gallery should have a point of view. A collector should have one too.

Having taste was never about knowing which artists you're supposed to admire, or owning whatever everyone currently wants, and it isn't about automatically rejecting whatever's popular either. It's developing your own eye deeply enough to say, honestly, I understand why this matters, and I still don't love it. Or just as honestly, nobody else seems to care about this one, and I do.

Both of those take real confidence to say out loud.

New to collecting? Learn how developing your own eye actually works →

Marcolina's Fine Arts Gallery is Tampa Bay's leading contemporary fine art gallery. Original works by Guillo Pérez 3, Willy Pérez, Ailene Fields, John Gurbacs, Elizabeth Fontaine-Barr, and represented artists. Private viewings by appointment. Ships worldwide.