“I was inspired to make these photographs by the poetry of seventh century hermit/mystics living in Remote-a-stan.” If your introduction or artist’s statement starts out like that, you probably lost just about everyone in your audience except the curator and the other five or six people that were similarly inspired by the poetry of hermit/mystic monks that lived in Remote-a-stan fourteen centuries ago. For the rest of us, we’ll just stroll around and look at the photographs. We can enjoy and understand the technical aspects and compositions of the images, but we will have an incomplete understanding of the art because the artist created a barrier to our enjoyment of the work.
One thing that makes art “universal” is a common experience between the artist and the audience. The cultural homogeneity of the audiences in the past insured that visual clues and themes would be understood and appreciated by the masses. The increasing diversity of western culture and the desire to specialize results in art being relevant a small group of viewers. Outsiders need not apply.
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