I recently saw an exhibition of the work of Rashid Johnson at the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art. I found it difficult to understand and relate to. I think partially that’s because he, like many other contemporary artists, focuses on very personal imagery and references that are not universal enough for most viewers to relate to. This forms part of a broader critique of modern and contemporary art and artists. Let’s explore these ideas, including the common criticisms by museum visitors as well as scholars and the responses to these criticisms by artists and scholars.

 

The most interesting question here is not simply whether the criticism is correct or incorrect, but what assumptions about art each side is bringing to the discussion.

 

The museum describes Johnson’s exhibition as an exploration of history, Black identity, masculinity, parenthood, philosophy, self-care, and the human psyche, using frameworks drawn from art history and Black popular culture.  

 

The question many visitors ask is: How am I supposed to connect to that if I don’t share those experiences or recognize those references?

 

I think this criticism can be unpacked into several related concerns.

 

The first is what we might call the loss of shared symbolism.

 

For most of human history, artists worked within symbolic systems that were widely shared by their audiences. Medieval Christians recognized saints, halos, and biblical stories. Renaissance Italians understood classical mythology. Buddhist viewers understood mudras and bodhisattvas. Even when viewers did not grasp every detail, they shared enough cultural knowledge to enter the work.

 

Many contemporary artists intentionally reject those common symbolic languages. Instead they build personal symbolic systems. Rashid Johnson’s shea butter, black soap, mirrors, plants, books, records, tiled shelves, and particular authors all have meanings, but those meanings emerge from his own biography, African American intellectual history, and contemporary cultural discourse. They are not universally legible.

 

The result is that the viewer often feels like an outsider looking into someone else’s memory palace.

 

This is very different from looking at, say, Michelangelo, whose imagery assumed a large common cultural vocabulary.

 

A second criticism concerns what might be called the privatization of meaning.

 

Many visitors feel contemporary art asks them to appreciate experiences that belong primarily to the artist.

 

They often say things like:

 

• “This seems meaningful to him, but not to me.”

• “I’m looking at someone else’s therapy session.”

• “Without the wall label I wouldn’t know what any of this means.”

 

This complaint became especially common after the rise of conceptual art in the 1960s.

 

Critics sometimes describe this as art becoming increasingly autobiographical.

 

Interestingly, Johnson himself often embraces autobiography, although he usually argues that his personal experience is intended as a doorway into larger questions about anxiety, vulnerability, and humanity rather than as an end in itself.  

 

A third criticism is that context has replaced direct experience.

 

Many museum visitors notice something peculiar:

 

A medieval painting often remains emotionally compelling even if you know almost nothing about Christianity.

 

A portrait by Rembrandt often communicates humanity without explanation.

 

A landscape by Caspar David Friedrich can move viewers who know nothing about German Romanticism.

 

But many contemporary installations seem to require reading two pages of wall text before they become meaningful.

 

People sometimes joke “The label is more interesting than the artwork.”

 

This is one of the most persistent criticisms of conceptual art.

 

Scholars sympathetic to contemporary art usually respond that this expectation is itself historically unusual. They argue that earlier viewers also required extensive cultural education. A fifteenth-century peasant would have recognized biblical imagery because he had been immersed in Christian culture since childhood. Likewise, contemporary viewers who spend years immersed in postcolonial theory, Black studies, psychoanalysis, or conceptual art begin to read Johnson’s symbols fluently.

 

In other words, contemporary art has not abandoned symbolism.

 

It has changed who is expected to know the symbolic language.

 

This is an important point, although it doesn’t entirely answer the visitor’s frustration.

 

A fourth criticism concerns the shrinking implied audience.

 

Earlier artists often imagined broad publics.

 

Johnson, like many contemporary artists, seems to imagine a viewer capable of navigating philosophy, literary references, Black intellectual history, conceptual art, psychology, and art history simultaneously.

 

This creates what some critics call a highly educated “ideal viewer.”

 

Museum visitors sometimes feel excluded rather than invited.

 

Some critics—including even reviewers generally favorable to Johnson—have argued that parts of his work risk becoming conceptually overextended or overly dependent on institutional framing.  

 

The fifth criticism is especially interesting.

 

Many visitors are not actually asking for universality.

 

They are asking for entry points.

 

Consider literature.

 

James Joyce is intensely personal and culturally specific.

 

Yet readers can usually enter Ulysses through recognizable experiences:

 

• embarrassment

• desire

• grief

• boredom

• family

• memory

 

The particulars become universal because the emotional architecture remains accessible.

 

Some visitors struggle with Johnson because they encounter the particulars before they discover the emotional architecture.

 

The exhibition can initially feel like decoding references rather than entering feelings.

 

Ironically, one of the strongest readings of the Fort Worth exhibition argues almost exactly the opposite: that Johnson is using these materials poetically to move beyond literal politics toward questions of shared humanity and introspection, even while remaining rooted in Black experience.  

 

This brings us to perhaps the deepest issue.

 

What should art primarily do?

 

There are at least four competing answers.

 

The classical answer says art should reveal universal aspects of human nature.

 

The Romantic answer says art should express authentic individual experience.

 

The modernist answer says art should investigate the nature of perception and artistic language itself.

 

Much contemporary art says art should investigate how identities, histories, institutions, and power shape lived experience.

 

These are not mutually exclusive, but they place different weights on universality and particularity.

 

One observation I find helpful is that there are actually two different kinds of universality.

 

The first is symbolic universality.

 

Everyone recognizes the same symbols.

 

The second is structural universality.

 

Everyone recognizes the underlying emotional or psychological process, even if the symbols are unfamiliar.

 

For example, you may know nothing about Japanese tea ceremony, but if a film shows someone carefully preparing tea after the death of a loved one, you immediately understand the emotional function of the ritual.

 

The symbols are culturally specific.

 

The human process is universal.

 

Many of the strongest contemporary artists succeed by making that transition.

 

The challenge for Johnson—and perhaps the reason some visitors struggle—is that he often asks viewers to spend considerable time inside the symbolic world before its deeper human structure becomes apparent.

 

That raises a question I find increasingly important for museums.

 

Perhaps contemporary art should not necessarily become less personal. Instead, museums might become much better at helping visitors cross the bridge from the artist’s private symbolic language to the underlying human experiences. Rather than explaining what shea butter, black soap, or broken mirrors signify in Johnson’s practice, they could begin with more universal questions: What objects in your own life carry memories? What rituals help you care for yourself? What physical spaces do you build when you feel anxious?

 

Once visitors answer those questions for themselves, Johnson’s objects stop functioning merely as biographical references and begin to operate as one person’s version of capacities that almost everyone possesses. The exhibition becomes less an invitation to decode another person’s symbols and more an invitation to notice the symbolic worlds we all construct, even if they are made from different materials. That, arguably, is where Johnson’s work is aiming—but it is not always where visitors begin.

 

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The museum’s description of the exhibition as an exploration of various themes makes sense to me and I think exploring these themes is very important. However, if the exploration is made in a very personal and hermetic way, as it is with Johnson and so many other contemporary artists, then any results of these explorations are not available to the viewer, and this is unfortunate. A lot of effort and thinking and work and exploration went into these artworks, but the results seem cut off from all of us on the outside. This is deeply frustrating to me because I really would like to understand the exploration and its results. 

 

I think you’ve put your finger on a tension that many thoughtful viewers experience, and one that has been discussed by philosophers, critics, and artists themselves.

 

There is an important distinction between witnessing an exploration and sharing in an exploration.

 

Many contemporary artists invite us to witness the traces of their exploration—the objects they chose, the symbols they assembled, the emotional residue that remains. But they do not necessarily provide access to the cognitive or emotional journey that led there.

 

Imagine two notebooks.

 

The first contains a scientist’s complete research journal: hypotheses, failed experiments, moments of doubt, surprising discoveries, and the final conclusions.

 

The second contains only the specimens collected during the expedition.

 

Many contemporary installations can feel like the second notebook. We see the specimens, but not the expedition.

 

That seems close to what you’re describing.

 

This is different from much earlier art.

 

Take Michelangelo. We do not simply encounter the products of his theological reflection. The composition itself guides our attention, stages emotional encounters, and reveals relationships among ideas. The artwork becomes a vehicle through which we undergo something analogous to the artist’s own inquiry.

 

Or consider Pablo Picasso. One does not need to know every detail of his personal life to experience the successive transformations of form in Cubism. The paintings themselves enact a visual investigation into perception. The viewer can repeat that investigation by looking carefully.

 

This is what you seem to be asking of Johnson.

 

Not that he abandon his personal experience.

 

Rather:

 

Show me the path, not only the destination.

 

Or perhaps even:

 

Let me perform the experiment alongside you.

 

That is a different demand than asking for more universal symbols.

 

It is asking for communicable inquiry.

 

I think this distinction helps explain why certain contemporary artists often connect more readily with broad audiences.

 

William Kentridge, for example, frequently leaves the erasures, revisions, and changes visible in his charcoal animations. The viewer literally watches thought evolving. The process becomes the artwork.

 

Joseph Beuys surrounded himself with intensely personal mythology, but he also lectured constantly, debated audiences, and described his ideas in great detail. Whether one agrees with him or not, he attempted to open the exploratory process.

 

Olafur Eliasson designs installations that function almost as experiments. Rather than saying, “Here is my experience,” he asks, “Let’s investigate perception together.”

 

These artists differ enormously, but each gives the viewer a role beyond spectator.

 

Some critics have argued that late twentieth-century art shifted from creating experiences to presenting positions. The artwork increasingly became evidence that an investigation had occurred, rather than a means by which viewers could undertake a similar investigation themselves. That is certainly not true of all contemporary art, but it captures something about the frustration you are articulating.

 

There is another issue here that I think is even more fundamental.

 

A great deal of contemporary art inherited a suspicion of universality.

 

After decades of feminist, postcolonial, queer, and critical race scholarship, many artists became wary of claiming that their experience represented “the human condition.” They emphasized situatedness instead: this is my experience, shaped by my history, my body, my community. That shift corrected genuine blind spots in earlier art history, where the experiences of relatively privileged groups were often presented as if they were universal.

 

But there is a possible unintended consequence.

 

If every symbolic system remains tightly bound to the artist’s particular identity and biography, then viewers can struggle to discern what the work contributes to a broader understanding of human life. The pendulum can swing so far toward particularity that the artwork loses what philosophers sometimes call generalizability—not because the underlying insights are absent, but because the work does not make them sufficiently available.

 

That is close to your observation that “the results seem cut off from all of us on the outside.”

 

Some contemporary artists would answer that the work is not intended to transmit conclusions at all. They might say that the installation is not the report of an investigation but a catalyst for the viewer’s own associations. Meaning arises in the encounter rather than being communicated from artist to audience. That idea owes much to thinkers like Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, who argued that artworks remain open to multiple interpretations.

 

But one can accept that theory and still ask a reasonable question:

 

If the artist spent years developing a rich understanding of anxiety, identity, memory, or history, shouldn’t the artwork help the viewer gain access to some of those insights?

 

That question has real force.

 

It points toward a conception of art not merely as expression but as knowledge. Under this view, artists are explorers who return with discoveries. The artwork should function somewhat like a well-written ethnography, philosophical dialogue, or scientific paper: it should enable others to learn something they did not previously know or perceive.

 

Interestingly, this expectation is not foreign to the history of art. Renaissance theorists often argued that painting should teach as well as delight. Enlightenment thinkers saw art as a means of cultivating judgment. Even many modernists believed that art could reveal previously unseen structures of perception. In each case, the artwork was expected to communicate discoveries, not simply embody them.

 

Perhaps the question worth asking of an exhibition like Johnson’s is not, “Do I understand his symbols?” but rather, “After spending an hour here, what do I now understand about anxiety, memory, identity, ritual, or care that I could not have understood before?” If the answer feels elusive, that may indicate a gap—not necessarily in the quality of the work, but in the bridge between the artist’s inquiry and the viewer’s participation.

 

That bridge may be one of the central challenges facing museums and contemporary artists today. It is not enough to preserve the authenticity of personal exploration; there is also the challenge of making that exploration shareable without reducing its complexity. When that bridge exists, viewers often leave feeling that they have not simply observed an artist’s inner world—they have expanded their own.

 

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Let’s sketch out a more useful way to approach his exhibition. Instead of seeing the exhibition as an invitation to decode another person’s symbols, let’s make it an invitation to notice the symbolic worlds we all construct, even if they are made from very different materials. 

 

This requires a subtle shift in where the museum asks the viewer to place their attention.

 

Many museums implicitly ask visitors “What does this object mean to Rashid Johnson?”That is a reasonable art historical question, but it can also become a dead end. Unless you happen to share Johnson’s cultural background or have studied his work, you can feel as though you are permanently one step behind.

 

Instead, imagine if the exhibition began with a different premise:

 

This exhibition is not primarily about Rashid Johnson. It is about the symbolic architecture that every human being builds around themselves. Johnson has simply made his architecture visible.

 

That shift in perspective allows us to start asking different questions. Instead of seeing his shelves as collections of mysterious objects, you begin asking:

 

“If someone built shelves that represented my life, what would be on them?”

 

Perhaps:

 

• a coffee mug from a particular period of your life

• your grandmother’s recipe box

• hiking boots

• favorite novels

• a souvenir from a memorable trip

• your children’s drawings

• old concert tickets

 

None of these objects would mean very much to another visitor without explanation.

 

Yet to you these objects carry decades of memory.

 

Suddenly Johnson’s shelves no longer seem strange.

 

They’re simply more visible than yours.

 

⸻

 

The mirrors become interesting in the same way.

 

Rather than asking,

 

“Why does Johnson use mirrors?”

 

begin with

 

“What are the mirrors in my own psychological life?”

 

Where do I see myself?

 

Through family?

 

Work?

 

Success?

 

Race?

 

Religion?

 

Friends?

 

Social media?

 

Books?

 

How do those mirrors distort or clarify who I think I am?

 

Now Johnson’s mirrors become prompts rather than symbols to decode.

 

⸻

 

The plants can be approached similarly.

 

Instead of asking “What species is this and why did Johnson choose it?”

 

We start asking “What do I cultivate?”

 

Every person is cultivating something.

 

Knowledge.

 

Friendships.

 

Health.

 

Status.

 

Children.

 

Beauty.

 

Security.

 

Hope.

 

Fear.

 

The plants become embodiments of cultivation itself.

 

⸻

 

The books can be approached in the same way:

 

Rather than trying to recognize every author and title,

 

We can start asking “Which writers, musicians, films, or conversations have become part of my own inner furniture?”

 

Johnson’s library becomes one example among millions.

 

⸻

 

Even his recurring use of black soap and shea butter becomes more accessible.

 

These are clearly rooted in Black cultural history and domestic practice, and those contexts remain important.

 

But beneath that specificity lies a broader human structure:

 

Every culture has rituals of care.

 

Every family develops particular smells, textures, foods, objects, and routines that come to feel like home.

 

We can start asking a question like “What substances instantly tell my body that I belong somewhere?”

 

For one person it might be olive oil.

 

Another cedar.

 

Another incense.

 

Another sunscreen.

 

Another the smell of motor oil in a parent’s garage.

 

The point is not to replace Johnson’s symbols with yours.

 

The point is to recognize that symbolic attachment itself is universal.

 

⸻

 

The recurring themes of Johnson’s work can also be reframed.

 

Take anxiety.

 

Instead of asking “How does Rashid Johnson experience anxiety?”

 

We can instead start asking “If my own anxiety were to build a room, what would it put inside?”

 

Would the room be filled with clocks?

 

Unpaid bills?

 

Perfectly organized shelves?

 

Locked doors?

 

Half-finished projects?

 

Family photographs?

 

Boulders crushing objects underneath them?

 

Suddenly you’re no longer observing Johnson’s psyche. You’re discovering your own symbolic language.

 

⸻

 

What I especially like about this approach is that it preserves Johnson’s specificity.

 

It does not universalize by flattening difference.

 

It says instead “Every human being constructs symbolic worlds.”

 

Johnson’s symbolic world happens to be shaped by African American history, philosophy, fatherhood, anxiety, literature, and contemporary life.

 

Mine is shaped by different histories specific to me.

 

Yours is shaped by still other histories specific to you.

 

The commonality is not the symbols. 

 

The commonality is the symbolic process.

 

This sort of perspective shift could be something that a museum could foster and encourage through its signage. Instead of presenting labels that primarily explain the artist’s references, they could present labels that alternate between interpretation and participation.

 

For example:

 

Interpretation

 

Johnson frequently uses shea butter because of its connections to Black domestic traditions, care, and cultural memory.

 

Participation

 

Think about one ordinary object in your own home that carries emotional weight far beyond its practical function. Why has it become symbolic?

 

Another example:

 

Interpretation

 

These shelves assemble books, plants, ceramics, records, and personal artifacts into an environment of thought.

 

Participation

 

If someone had to understand you only through twenty objects, which would you choose? Which objects would surprise people? Which would be indispensable?

 

Notice what happens.

 

The visitor no longer leaves merely knowing something about Rashid Johnson.

 

The visitor leaves thinking in new ways about themselves.

 

And that, I think, comes much closer to the deepest ambitions of art.

 

 

We can even go one step further. Johnson’s exhibition could be understood as an invitation to become an anthropologist of one’s own life. Anthropologists have long studied how other cultures invest ordinary objects with extraordinary significance. Johnson invites us to reverse the gaze. We begin to notice that our own homes are filled with artifacts, rituals, materials, scents, sounds, and arrangements that quietly sustain our identities. We have become so accustomed to them that they seem “natural,” but they are every bit as symbolic as Johnson’s shea butter, mirrors, and books. If the exhibition succeeds in prompting that realization, then it ceases to be primarily a portrait of one artist’s inner world and becomes a meditation on the universal human capacity to build meaning out of the materials of everyday life. That is a much more generous and participatory way of entering his work.