In graduate school, one mantra was drilled into us over and over: avoid cliché at all costs. It was practically gospel. Any hint of predictability—whether in subject, form, or execution—was to be rooted out and replaced with something authentic, something bold, something that hadn’t been said a thousand times before.
And yet, when I look around at much of the contemporary art world today, all I see is cliché.
The same themes appear again and again—identity, trauma, capitalism, climate anxiety. Important subjects, no doubt, but treated in ways that often feel safe, predictable, and flat. There’s a checklist quality to it, as if the work were designed more for grant applications and curatorial approval than for artistic risk or revelation.
Art is supposed to provoke, to awaken. But too much of what I see merely confirms. It reflects the viewer’s values back at them without asking anything in return. It’s comfortable. And in that comfort, something essential gets lost.
We were taught to seek our own voice—but the art world now feels like it speaks in a single dialect. Walk through a major gallery, scroll through the social media feeds of rising artists, and it all starts to blur. Neon signs with clever phrases. Ironic gestures involving fast food. Politically charged performance lectures. It’s as if everyone’s pulling from the same playbook.
Social media, of course, accelerates the problem. Platforms like Instagram reward the polished, the palatable, the easy-to-understand. But art isn’t supposed to be easy. It should take time to digest. It should resist quick meaning. It should live with you—and maybe even bother you.
What’s gone missing is the avant-garde spirit. There’s no Pollock flinging paint in defiance of control. No Duchamp turning a urinal into a philosophical time bomb. No Warhol turning banality into commentary. Today, we mistake visibility for relevance. We reward familiarity over friction.
There are still powerful, original voices out there. But they’re often drowned in a sea of sameness—an ocean of work that feels algorithmic, derivative, and devoid of genuine risk.
And maybe that’s the real tragedy: not that the art is bad, but that it’s afraid. Afraid to be misunderstood. Afraid to offend. Afraid to fail. In our attempt to make art that’s socially conscious and institutionally acceptable, we’ve created a culture where imitation is safer than invention.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We need to return to that lesson from graduate school—not just as a rule, but as a rallying cry. Avoid cliché. Seek truth. Create something that doesn’t already exist.
Art isn’t here to soothe us. It’s here to stir us. ~John Kobeck