Notes from an Art Worker: No. 6, The Most Honest Reaction to Art Might Still Be Confusion

The writer is the Director of Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and a curator-historian.

One of the most common reactions to contemporary art is also the one people are least willing to admit publicly: confusion. Perhaps outrage, maybe revelation, but the shy uncertainty about what exactly they are looking at, and, admittingly, the fear that they are somehow failing the experience by not immediately understanding, is slowly taking over.

I actually quite like this feeling of confusion; I have always preferred this reaction as a curator. Because confusion, despite its terrible reputation, may be one of the last honest forms of looking left in today’s culture. Confusion feels different from simply not understanding. With confusion, there is a willingness and openness to learning more about it as it resists immediate translation. The sentiment interrupts the comforting sense that you already know what is happening. So, rather than providing answers, it creates questions and such questions matter because this is where learning begins.

As we live in an era that prioritises immediate clarity, visual content often comes with explanations and easily accessible information just a few prompts away, making us feel like we are well-informed. On top of this, algorithms predict our preferences even before we have fully developed them ourselves. Such opinions are then circulated in pre-packaged formats, ready to be shared before genuine reflection has had time to occur. And so, increasingly and worryingly, our relationship to culture is organised around speed, recognition, and certainty. Judgement thus becomes quicker and quicker. It is perhaps therefore unsurprising that audiences bring these expectations into museums as well.

But I don’t think art is there to provide instant certainty. Some artworks develop gradually, others intentionally stay partially inaccessible, and some even lack coherence altogether. Encountering something unresolved, contradictory, or opaque, therefore, doesn't necessarily mean failure; it may simply show that the work is meant to be more than a quick consumption. Museums add to this complexity because they are not neutral environments but are shaped by specific knowledge, by certain types of education, and, of course, a set of cultural norms. Hence, confusion challenges this structured environment by introducing vulnerability into spaces meant to be composed. Perhaps, this very vulnerability is where art finds its value.

What interests me is why confusion has become so uncomfortable in the first place. Perhaps because confusion destabilises our sense of competence? Not understanding something immediately raises the possibility that our knowledge, taste, education or social status may not be as special as we imagine, and therefore interrupts the performance of certainty within our own characters.

We often speak about knowledge as though it arrives fully formed, as though understanding can simply be delivered from one person to another. Yet most genuine learning actually begins with uncertainty. An artwork may introduce a perspective we have never considered, an experience we have never lived, or a way of seeing that sits outside our existing assumptions. The resulting confusion is therefore not necessarily a failure of communication but an invitation to remain with something unfamiliar long enough for new forms of understanding to emerge. This is why I believe confusion can be productive. It keeps interpretation open, preventing us from arriving at conclusions too quickly and allowing multiple possibilities to coexist before one settles into so-called certainty.

Of course, not all confusion is equal. Some artworks are simply unsuccessful. Some exhibitions disappear beneath layers of curatorial vocabulary. Occasionally, confusion is not complexity but poor communication dressed up as conceptual sophistication. But meaningful confusion leaves a different trace. You walk away still thinking about the work, still trying to make sense of it, slightly irritated that it has refused to settle neatly into understanding. Well, perhaps irritation matters too here. We often forget that many of the artworks now celebrated within art history were initially misunderstood; they were continuously rejected or simply dismissed. Think Van Gogh, Duchamp, Basquiat, any female artists…

So can confusion arrive before comprehension catches up? New ways of seeing rarely appear fully formed as they emerge awkwardly and often require audiences to sit with uncertainty before meaning becomes visible.

This makes our contemporary obsession with clarity particularly curious. We claim to value complexity, nuance, and critical thinking, yet we increasingly demand that culture explain itself immediately, even though genuine complexity rarely works that way. It requires duration and a willingness to remain temporarily lost.

And that lingering uncertainty is where art becomes most alive. Not when it confirms what we already know, but when it opens a space in which something new might be learned.