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Should art ever acquire a target audience?

Author: Karolina Niewiadomska


‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ (2019), dir. by Céline Sciamma “Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019).”IMDb,2019,www.imdb.com/title/tt8613070/mediaviewer/rm2604053249/?ref_=ttmi_mi_28_1. Accessed 15 Feb. 2026


I remember when a few months ago one of my friends kept recommending a film called ‘Portrait of a Lady on fire’(2019) to - it seemed to me - literally everyone and one of the response she got was ‘I watched it and it was really nice and artsy but I don’t think I’m quite the target audience of it’. The reason for that was basically that the film told the story of two queer women while the person who gave the response was a hetero teenage guy who never really had to face the issues the characters in the film did. What he outlined was that the film seemed to be teeming with this sadness he couldn’t necessarily identify with himself. The fact that the film had no significant male character in it probably added to the impression too, though he did not mention it. At that time we both understood the opinion, and appreciated that he didn’t take the film as boring and lacking. Yet the more I think about it now, the more it can’t cease to amaze me how it is a common approach that we believe we should be represented in order to acknowledge the art we’re seeing.


So to select art as one obtaining the target audience is basically to select art as a product. Which does seem strange because analogically it also selects everything else that theoretically has a target audience as a product.


That’s when it is important to see it from a practical perspective. We seem to be used to this idea of a target audience because in school we are taught patterns involving it. Any time you are given a writing English assignment you are reminded to address your target audience. An email you write in class is not a product, obviously, but it is a transaction of a kind. To illustrate, as you obtain this ability to write and to find your target audience, you can later utilize this ability and exchange it for the respect of the person you write the letter to. So in that academic scenario it does seem to work but it does not explain why art should ever be read in the same way.


Art is not a product to obtain, not unless you are really wealthy at least. The average price of an artwork sold at auction in the US in 2023 was said to be almost twenty thousand dollars. And while the outcome is heavily skewed by the most expensive pieces of work and 80% of it was said to be sold under four thousand dollars, speaking realistically it is still a ton of money and normally people would not choose to spend their wage on a painting or anything from that ‘art area’. Most people, if they want to have something to do with art (art in the meaning of a broad term), they would go to a museum, go to the movies, ‘go’ surf in the social media even. While they do that they would usually select the museum or the movie they choose to see by what they believe they would end up liking.


And while there is nothing wrong with that, we seem to be reaching a point where we are almost scared to be found in a position of selecting something that we would not like - or of choosing something we would later not be able to relate to. We choose to be locked in our own box of comfort, this illusion of always being a target audience of an area that should only ever have just an audience.


Oscar Wilde “The Sarony Photographs of Oscar Wilde.” Oscarwilde.us, 2021, www.oscarwilde.us/sarony/sarony-photographs-of-oscar-wilde-1882.html. Accessed 15 Feb. 2026


Oscar Wilde has written: It is the spectator and not life, that art really mirrors. But is it really the only purpose? To see ourselves in what is almost never more than a lie, a creation of unsatisfied humans that yearn for more? That is a tragedy of a kind, to not want to broaden the experience of living through cognizing formations of others who had lived before.


As I see it, art should never acquire a target audience. Why? Because the term implies an adjustment. It implies this algorithmic personalisation so that something fits you. In reality, when it comes to art there is no you. It does not matter whether you like something or you don’t. Because it should not matter whether art is liked or disliked. The only thing that art should be is known. With its reflection of reality it creates an artefact. It is no accident there are places in the world where creation of art is forbidden or censored. The most powerful that art can make you is to feel, whether you hate it, think it stupid or boring or shallow or deep. 


Go to that modern museum and despise what you see but leave opinionated. Leave and think for at least one second why that museum stands there. Why people go there. Why as a society we changed our perception and pushed the line of what we accept as art so that this contempt-worthy museum stands there. Spare it a thought and you will benefit no matter your opinion on it or not. It’s important you don't let it disappear. 


When one chooses to identify himself with being a target audience of one type of art, he isolates himself from the others. This art that’s left from his view becomes meaningless and purposeless. A product corrupted by a capitalistic perception. Something that could as well be nonexistent. With that way there seems to be a creation of socially acceptable unofficial censorship as art even though not hidden could just as well be erased.


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Page design: Amelia Puchalska

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