Art for and by Everyone: The Anti-Snobbery Manifesto
Why Everything You Do Is Already Art
A meditation on creativity, snobbery, and the beautiful accidents that happen when you stop trying so hard
I'm sitting in a park next to a sculpture that just stopped me in my tracks. The kind of piece that makes you forget you're supposed to be somewhere else, that draws you into its presence like a gravitational field. And suddenly I'm thinking about art snobbery—not to rage against it, but to understand what it actually means and why we've created these invisible hierarchies around human creativity.
Prometheus I serves as the first trial of man as he introduces himself to nature.
Here's my confession: I was never an "artist" in the traditional sense. You know the drill—drawing faces that actually look like faces, capturing the perfect light on a landscape, composing melodies that follow rules I never learned. For most of my life, I thought art meant mastering your motor nerves to the point where you could translate what you see in nature onto paper or canvas with technical precision.
But then something unexpected happened.
The Phone as Canvas
Two years ago, I downloaded an app called Concepts on my phone. Not because I had artistic ambitions, but because I had a stylus and figured, why not fuck around with the screen? That was literally my entire creative philosophy: "Why not fuck around with the screen?"
I'm good at fucking around with things. Give me an Apple device, and I want to touch it, feel it, explore every corner of its interface. It's the same impulse that makes people stare at the Chicago Bean—yeah, it's just a reflective surface, but someone declared it art and made it beautiful, so now we gather around it in reverence. How wonderfully absurd.
Through all that digital messing around, something magical happened: accidents. Beautiful, unexpected accidents that I decided to keep rather than delete. And here's what I learned—a good artist isn't someone who never makes mistakes. A good artist knows what to throw out and what to keep.
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Redefining the Canvas
But this realization made me look back at my corporate life with new eyes. All those years in corporate engineering, designing test setups, creating new documentation systems, innovating on system designs, figuring out better ways to train employees—wasn't that art too?
When you design a communication system between departments that actually works, you're creating something from nothing. When you solve a training problem with an elegant solution that makes complex information digestible, you're engaging in the same creative process as any sculptor or painter.
The difference is that we don't hang those solutions in galleries or sell them at art auctions. But they're still born from that same mysterious space where imagination meets practical need, where you're designing something that didn't exist before.
The Everyday Creativity We Miss
Even the ability to author thoughts on the fly that make me laugh—isn't that a form of art? When philosophers like Socrates or Marcus Aurelius were conducting thought experiments, questioning assumptions, internally boiling the soup of ideas until something new emerged—they were artists of consciousness.
We call it philosophy, but they were designing thought in ways that hadn't been done before. They were creating frameworks for understanding existence that continue to influence how we think thousands of years later.
The Tyranny of Traditional Categories
Here's where art snobbery becomes interesting rather than just irritating. We've been conditioned to offer patronage only to certain sanctioned forms of creativity—the opera, the museum piece, the concert hall performance. There's this whole ecosystem of "high culture" that requires specific knowledge, social codes, and economic access to fully appreciate.
But what if that's just artificial scarcity applied to human creativity?
When I look at the digital art I've accidentally created through phone screen experimentation, I see the same principles that make traditional art compelling: asymmetry done well, attention to minute details, visual elements that draw the eye and hold it. The medium is different, but the underlying creative impulses are identical.
The Great Democratization
We're living through the most dramatic democratization of creative tools in human history. Anyone with a smartphone has access to photography, video editing, music production, graphic design, and publishing platforms that would have required professional studios just decades ago.
The barriers between "professional artists" and "everyone else" are dissolving in real time. You don't need gallery representation to show your work to the world. You don't need a record label to distribute your music. You don't need a publisher to reach readers.
This terrifies some people in the traditional art world, and I understand why. When anyone can create and distribute art, what happens to the gatekeepers? What happens to the carefully maintained hierarchies that separate "real" artists from amateurs?
Your Art Is Your Signature
But here's what I think they're missing: democratizing the tools doesn't diminish the art. It multiplies it exponentially. Every person who picks up a digital paintbrush, writes a blog post, composes a beat, or documents their life through photography is adding to the total amount of human creativity in the world.
Your sensibilities are unique to you. The way you see color, organize information, solve problems, or express emotion—that's your artistic signature, whether you're consciously creating "art" or just living your life with intention and creativity.
The Anti-Snobbery Manifesto
So maybe the real question isn't "What qualifies as art?" but "Why are we so invested in limiting the definition?"
Art snobbery often masks a deeper anxiety about value and meaning. If everyone can be an artist, how do we determine what's worth paying attention to? If creativity is democratized, how do we maintain the social structures built around artistic scarcity?
But these are the wrong questions. The right question is: "How do we celebrate and nurture the creative capacity that exists in every human being?"
Because when you start seeing creativity everywhere—in the way someone organizes their workspace, solves a technical problem, tells a story, or even cooks a perfect saag paneer—the world becomes infinitely more interesting.
The Beautiful Accidents
The paintings I've attached to this blog post emerged from pure experimentation. No formal training, no predetermined vision, just curiosity and willingness to explore what happens when you stop trying to control the outcome.
They represent my sensibilities—my particular way of seeing color, form, and composition. Whether they belong in a gallery is irrelevant. They exist as expressions of consciousness engaging with creative possibility, which is all any art has ever been.
The Invitation
Your creative expression is already happening, whether you recognize it or not. The way you solve problems, organize your thoughts, arrange your living space, tell stories, or approach challenges—all of it contains the seeds of artistic innovation.
The question isn't whether you're an artist. The question is whether you're paying attention to the art you're already creating.
Stop asking permission. Start paying attention. And the next time someone dismisses your creative experiments as "not real art," remember that every revolutionary artistic movement began with someone deciding that the established definitions were too small for what they needed to express.
Your art is your signature. Sign boldly.
What forms of everyday creativity have you been overlooking in your own life? How might the world change if we recognized and celebrated the artistic capacity in every human endeavor?
Love and Peace (and Beautiful Accidents),
The Curious Nobody
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