An Article by D.M. (1815 words, 10 min. read)
What Happens When We Stop Looking at the Art?
An art scene can have everything. Talented artists. Serious galleries. Passionate collectors. Curators with vision. Museums, foundations, critics, fairs, exhibitions and an audience hungry for culture. And still, something can slowly weaken from within.
Jealousy. Rivalry. Territorial behaviour. Imitation. Gossip. The obsession with who is selling, who is exhibiting, who is receiving attention and who seems to be moving faster than everyone else.
These may sound like small human weaknesses. Together, they can shape an entire cultural environment.
Because an art scene is built through relationships as much as through artworks. It depends on trust between artists and galleries, respect between galleries themselves, intellectual honesty between artists, independence among critics and curators, and a certain generosity toward another person’s success. Once these relationships become governed by competition and suspicion, something essential changes. Energy that could have gone into creating, discovering and building begins circulating elsewhere.
And perhaps this deserves to be spoken about openly.
When Jealousy Enters the Room
Artists spend their lives searching for freedom, originality and a language of their own, yet they evolve within an environment where comparison is almost permanent. Who is exhibiting where? Who sold? Who was invited? Who entered a collection? Who received an article, a prize, a residency, a museum show? Who was standing beside which collector at an opening?
These questions seem anecdotal. Put together, they reveal something deeper.
Jealousy exists everywhere because it belongs to human nature. Within art, it touches something particularly intimate. An artist creates from years of work, doubt, experience and obsession. Recognition therefore reaches far beyond professional success. It touches identity. And when someone else’s success awakens frustration, the reaction sometimes leaves the private sphere and begins influencing an entire professional environment.
That is when jealousy becomes interesting to examine. Because an emotion belongs to one person. A climate belongs to everyone.
A Very Small World
Beirut makes this phenomenon particularly visible.
Our artistic community is vibrant, energetic and surprisingly rich for the size of the city. It is also compact. The same collectors move between galleries. The same journalists attend openings. The same curators, artists and cultural figures meet several times within the same week.
In such a landscape, cooperation could become an extraordinary strength.
Yet even the simple matter of choosing an opening date sometimes turns into a declaration of territory. A gallery announces an opening. Another schedules its event at precisely the same time. Sometimes coincidence explains it. Sometimes everyone involved understands perfectly well what is happening.
And suddenly art lovers are calculating traffic and distances instead of looking at art. Collectors choose one gallery over another. Journalists rush through one opening to reach the next. Artists count visitors. Galleries observe whose room was fuller. An evening devoted to art quietly becomes a competition for bodies.
In a city the size of Beirut, a calendar can reveal a great deal about the mentality of an art scene.
Imagine what coordination could produce. Several openings spread intelligently across an evening or across different days could create movement throughout the city. A collector arriving for one event might discover another. A foreign visitor could experience the richness of Beirut as a whole. Everyone would gain visibility.
The audience is already small enough. Dividing it further serves nobody.
When Artists Become Territory
There is another form of competition that deserves attention because it touches the very structure of the art market: the relationship between artists and the galleries or curators who accompany them.
A gallerist can spend years building an artist’s career. There are studio visits, conversations, exhibitions, catalogues, introductions to collectors, participation in fairs, contacts with institutions and countless hours of work that remain invisible to the public. A serious professional relationship is built gradually. It requires investment, belief and trust.
Then success arrives, and suddenly the artist becomes desirable elsewhere.
Another gallery approaches. Better conditions are suggested. Greater visibility is promised. The artist is tempted. Sometimes another gallerist actively courts an artist already represented by a colleague, as though artists were trophies to be transferred from one stable to another.
This creates a peculiar form of rivalry. Instead of discovering voices, developing younger talents or constructing a distinctive programme, galleries can begin competing over artists whose careers have already been patiently developed elsewhere.
Yet loyalty works in both directions
Artists also have responsibilities toward the people who believed in them. An artist can become impatient after a successful exhibition or a few important sales. Another gallery appears more prestigious, another curator seems better connected, another opportunity looks more exciting. Years of collaboration can suddenly become secondary to the promise of the next step.
Professional relationships naturally evolve. Artists grow, galleries change direction, ambitions develop and collaborations reach different stages. What matters is the way these transitions happen. Transparency, conversation and respect preserve the value of what was built together.
An artist is neither the property of a gallery nor a product to be stolen. A gallery is also far more than a room where paintings hang. At its best, the relationship is a partnership. And partnerships deserve memory.
In an art world increasingly fascinated by immediate visibility, loyalty itself has become something worth protecting.
The Copy Is Getting Closer
Then there is imitation.
Every artist is influenced. Art history itself is a magnificent chain of influences, discoveries, ruptures and transformations. Artists look at art constantly. Something enters the eye, stays in the mind and eventually participates in the construction of a personal vocabulary.
But there is a point where influence becomes something else.
An artist develops a recognizable language. Soon the same palette appears elsewhere. Then similar compositions. Similar formats. Similar materials. Similar subjects. Sometimes even the way the work is photographed, framed, titled or presented begins to look familiar.
Social media has accelerated this phenomenon enormously. We now have access to thousands of artists every day. A visual idea born in Beirut can be seen in Paris, Seoul or Buenos Aires within seconds, just as an idea created elsewhere can arrive on a Lebanese artist’s phone before breakfast.
The temptation is enormous because the algorithm shows us what attracts attention. The market shows us what sells. Success provides a ready-made direction.
And gradually, instead of asking What do I have to say?, artists begin asking What is working?
That single shift can impoverish creativity more effectively than any lack of talent ever could.
Gossip Has a Market Value
There is also another currency circulating through the art world. Words.
Openings are extraordinary laboratories for this. Between two glasses and three conversations, careers are analysed with remarkable confidence.
Someone sold because of connections. Someone was invited because of friendship. Someone’s prices are exaggerated. Someone copied someone. Someone paid for visibility. Someone has become impossible. Someone is finished. Someone suddenly became important and everybody wants to know why.
The fascinating part is how quickly opinion becomes information.
A sentence is repeated. The second person adds a detail. The third remembers having heard something similar. By the time the story reaches a collector, curator or journalist, it has acquired the solidity of a fact.
For an artist, reputation is part of a career. Words therefore have consequences. They enter studios without knocking. They reach galleries, collectors, committees and institutions. Gossip may begin as entertainment and end as professional damage.
Perhaps this is one of the least discussed forms of power in the art world: the ability to shape how another person’s work is perceived before someone has even looked at it.
The Fear Behind Rivalry
Behind much of this behavior lies a very simple fear: If you have more, perhaps I will have less.
Less attention. Less space. Fewer collectors. Fewer invitations. Less recognition.
This mentality transforms an artistic community into a room with too few chairs, where everyone watches who is sitting down.
Yet culture grows through abundance of spirit.
When a Lebanese artist enters an important international collection, Lebanese art gains visibility. When a Beirut gallery participates successfully in a major fair, the city enters another conversation. When an exhibition attracts a large audience, people become curious about art. When a younger artist finds recognition, another generation begins to believe that a career is possible.
Success creates movement. Movement creates curiosity. Curiosity creates opportunities.
The art world becomes larger when people allow it to.
Originality Requires Solitude
Perhaps we also look at one another too much.
We see everyone’s studio on Instagram. We know what they are preparing before the exhibition opens. We see works in progress, new techniques, sales, installations, fairs, awards, dinners and collectors. The artistic life that once developed largely inside studios now develops partly under permanent observation.
Originality needs some distance from all this noise.
An artist needs time alone with uncertainty. Time to make something awkward. Time to fail. Time to abandon a direction. Time to discover a language before the world approves it.
When artists constantly monitor one another, the danger extends beyond copying. Everyone begins moving toward the same visual temperature. The same trends appear. The same subjects become urgent. The same materials become fashionable.
Creativity becomes truly exciting when someone takes the road nobody around them thought worth taking.
An Art Scene Is Also a Human Construction
We often speak about building an art scene through museums, foundations, galleries, fairs, auctions and institutions. Yet an art scene is also built in far smaller moments.
It is built when galleries communicate rather than fight over a calendar. When a gallerist respects the professional relationship between another gallery and its artist. When an artist remembers who invested time and belief in a career. When influence comes with acknowledgment. When a collector hears enthusiasm rather than poison. When a journalist approaches work with independence. When a curator looks beyond friendships and fashionable names. When an established artist welcomes a younger one into the conversation.
These moments rarely appear in catalogues. They create the culture surrounding the art.
Beirut has spent decades producing remarkable artists under circumstances that would have exhausted many cultural capitals. It has talent, history, collectors, galleries, critics, institutions and an extraordinary appetite for creation. What it needs just as urgently is generosity of space: intellectual space, professional space and human space.
Artists will compete. Galleries will defend their interests. Ambition will continue to propel careers. These forces can generate energy when they are accompanied by ethics, originality and respect.
Because perhaps the real measure of an art scene lies beyond the number of openings it holds, the prices reached at auction or the names travelling to international fairs. It lies in the culture it creates around its artists.
And when jealousy becomes louder than admiration, imitation easier than invention, gossip more exciting than discovery, and rivalry more important than art, an entire cultural scene begins spending its energy on the wrong masterpiece: each other.
