Away with Labels

August 1, 2025

It’s a reflex, this need to name things, to classify and box and shelve in neat little rows. We do it to understand, to feel a little more in control of the vast and often unruly sea of expression that art offers. But when it comes to the artist, living, breathing, working today, labeling feels more like a convenience for the viewer than a truth about the maker. Words like “Impressionist,” “Cubist,” “Abstract Expressionist”, these terms belong to specific movements, specific eras, born of particular cultural contexts and histories. They carry the weight of time, of revolutions and rebellions that shaped them. And while echoes of those movements might still whisper in a contemporary artist’s work, to call someone a “Cubist” in 2025 is to misunderstand both the art and the artist. That moment has passed. That wave has broken. What remains are its ripples, deep, yes, but not the same.

The artist today is not a label; they are a synthesis. They are the walking, working amalgam of everything that came before, absorbing, reinterpreting, dismantling, and rebuilding. They are not trying to revive history. They are mining it. Digging through the archives of art, plucking fragments of form, color, concept, method, and threading them together in ways that are profoundly personal. It’s not revivalism. It’s not mimicry. It’s transformation. Through this messy, nonlinear process, something new emerges, not new in the sense of “never seen before,” but new in the way a voice is new, even when speaking a familiar language.

And yet, still we reach for labels. It is human. We want to understand, to orient ourselves, to pin the butterfly to the board and say, “Ah, this is what it is.” But artists are not specimens. Their work doesn’t ask to be pinned; it asks to be engaged with, felt, wrestled with. The impulse to name something based on its most obvious traits, brushwork that recalls Monet, structure that nods to Picasso, is understandable, but it often cuts short a deeper inquiry. It flattens complexity into familiarity. It robs the artist of their agency to be more than just a sum of borrowed parts.

An artist may use the tools of Impressionism, the geometry of Cubism, the raw energy of Expressionism, but that doesn’t make them part of those schools. Those schools were moments, and this is another moment entirely. What we’re witnessing now is the fluidity of influence, not allegiance. Artists today do not belong to movements so much as they navigate through them, borrowing and bending, honoring and undoing in the same breath. They are not Impressionists or Cubists or any other fixed identity. They are themselves, until, perhaps, the accumulation of their own reinvention becomes something else entirely. Something future artists will mine.

The world doesn’t need another label. It needs curiosity. It needs patience. It needs the willingness to see without naming, to stand in front of a work and resist the urge to slot it into the familiar. To allow it to be what it is, and to let the artist remain unpinned, unboxed, alive in the full scope of their contradiction and continuity.