"I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about"
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The line skewers a familiar paradox: artists pride themselves on deflating the kitsch of their own culture, yet fall in love with ready-made stereotypes from elsewhere. Cliche is a shortcut, a prepackaged meaning that saves the trouble of looking closely. Holland points out how contempt for local shortcuts often coexists with a hunger for exotic ones, where distance lends an aura of depth, mystery, or authenticity that the familiar no longer provides.
As an American illustrator known for rigorous, concept-driven editorial images, Brad Holland spent decades resisting the stock symbolism favored by art directors and the marketplace. His skepticism targets more than individual taste; it challenges the art world’s habit of laundering cliche through novelty. Replace a domestic trope with a foreign motif and it suddenly reads as fresh, worldly, even progressive, though it may be just as formulaic. The issue is not curiosity about other cultures but the temptation to borrow their signs without understanding their histories.
This dynamic echoes what critics of Orientalism described: the West projecting fantasies onto distant societies, then consuming those fantasies as culture. In contemporary practice, it can appear as pattern-harvesting from Indigenous textiles, the mystical branding of Asian philosophies, or the aesthetic of poverty packaged as gritty authenticity. The artist gets the glamour of elsewhere while avoiding the hard work of knowledge, encounter, and accountability.
Holland’s barb presses for a different ethic. If cliches at home deserve scrutiny, cliches abroad demand even more. Depth comes from attention to specific lives, contexts, and forms, not from swapping one set of stereotypes for another. The artist’s task is to resist the seductions of both cynicism toward the familiar and romanticism toward the foreign. Originality begins when seeing replaces secondhand symbols and the urge to escape the local gives way to the harder discipline of understanding, wherever one looks.
As an American illustrator known for rigorous, concept-driven editorial images, Brad Holland spent decades resisting the stock symbolism favored by art directors and the marketplace. His skepticism targets more than individual taste; it challenges the art world’s habit of laundering cliche through novelty. Replace a domestic trope with a foreign motif and it suddenly reads as fresh, worldly, even progressive, though it may be just as formulaic. The issue is not curiosity about other cultures but the temptation to borrow their signs without understanding their histories.
This dynamic echoes what critics of Orientalism described: the West projecting fantasies onto distant societies, then consuming those fantasies as culture. In contemporary practice, it can appear as pattern-harvesting from Indigenous textiles, the mystical branding of Asian philosophies, or the aesthetic of poverty packaged as gritty authenticity. The artist gets the glamour of elsewhere while avoiding the hard work of knowledge, encounter, and accountability.
Holland’s barb presses for a different ethic. If cliches at home deserve scrutiny, cliches abroad demand even more. Depth comes from attention to specific lives, contexts, and forms, not from swapping one set of stereotypes for another. The artist’s task is to resist the seductions of both cynicism toward the familiar and romanticism toward the foreign. Originality begins when seeing replaces secondhand symbols and the urge to escape the local gives way to the harder discipline of understanding, wherever one looks.
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| Topic | Art |
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