The Nerdy and the everyday

What is art? For many of us, the word brings to mind quiet galleries and museums. We think of it as the work of specialists, separate from ordinary life. But that is only a fraction of the bigger picture. The line between what we call ‘art’ and the aesthetic things people do every day is not a hard border but a wide spectrum. Aesthetic choices shape our daily lives-from how we arrange our desktops to the clothes we wear. Understanding this full spectrum, from the professional to the everyday, allows us to challenge the myths of the art world and work towards a more honest and inclusive way of thinking about aesthetic practice. Here, ‘aesthetic’ does not simply mean what is beautiful or decorative. It refers to any deliberate shaping of form, pattern, or experience-any act that gives shape to meaning. Once we see it this way, it becomes clear that creativity is not confined to galleries but runs through the ordinary rhythms of living. This spectrum is broad, and it includes countless ways of thinking and seeing. What one person recognises as an aesthetic act depends on their background, culture, and cognitive style. Neurodivergent modes of engagement offer an especially vivid example: an intense focus on patterns and systems, or the rapid remixing of ideas often seen in ADHD, are not deficits but distinct ways of working with form and meaning. Like the aesthetic practices of daily life, such forms of making are often devalued by institutions precisely because they are inseparable from living itself. They are not detached objects for display but tools for navigating and making sense of the world. This is what connects the specialised and the everyday-the ‘nerdy’ programmer refining software art, the tabletop gamer building intricate worlds, and the person rearranging books on a shelf. All share a logic of pattern and order, the quiet satisfaction of shaping coherence out of chaos. The two have more in common with each other than with the formal art world that seeks to separate them. Everyday aesthetic practice is about more than decoration. The decisions we make about what to buy, repair, or discard have real social and ecological consequences. Digital platforms such as Pinterest make this visible, showing how people share aesthetic knowledge informally and develop collective taste outside institutions. Yet this activity is rarely recognised as “real art.” This gap between recognition and practice is not new. The philosopher John Dewey argued that art is not a remote object but an experience rooted in everyday life. Pierre Bourdieu later showed how “good taste” often functions as a social weapon, defining who belongs and who does not. More recent thinkers, such as Sianne Ngai and Lauren Berlant, remind us that our everyday judgments-calling something “cute” or “interesting,” or the attachments we form to objects and routines-are also deeply aesthetic acts. Together, they point to the same conclusion: the boundary between art and life has always been more ideological than real. The contemporary art world maintains its authority through exclusivity. It relies on specialist language and press-release jargon that replace direct discussion with strategic ambiguity. This creates the illusion of accessibility while reinforcing professional distance. An artist who masters this vocabulary gains visibility, but that does not make their work more meaningful. When audiences find museum texts obscure, it is often the institution that has failed to communicate, not the public that has failed to understand. This tension between art and everyday life has deep roots. The historical avant-gardes tried to erase that boundary, turning art into a form of social experiment. Their efforts are often described as failures because their works now sit in museums. But perhaps they were never meant to succeed. Their real value may lie in remaining an ongoing critique-a reminder that art could be otherwise, and that the horizon of possibility is what keeps it alive. The digital age has made these dynamics more complex. We are surrounded by what might be called “ambient aesthetic activity”-the continual shaping of online profiles, feeds, and interfaces. These gestures are often dismissed as superficial, yet professional artists and institutions now use the same platforms for self-presentation. In smaller nations such as Denmark, this overlaps with political and economic shifts: as public funding is reduced, artists are pushed toward the market, and market-friendly aesthetics become harder to escape. Once we look beyond Western institutions, it becomes clear that many cultures never made such a strict division between art and life. In several African societies, aesthetic expression is woven into functional objects and everyday rituals. Japanese concepts like wabi-sabi link refinement with the patient attention of daily care. These traditions recognise aesthetic value as a way of inhabiting the world, not an activity apart from it. The COVID-19 pandemic offered a contemporary parallel. Confined to their homes, people invested care and creativity into small acts-craft projects, home repairs, carefully arranged video-call backgrounds. These gestures revealed how deeply aesthetic activity is tied to well-being. Whether in ancient traditions or modern crises, the impulse is the same: to shape the world around us and make it meaningful, whether institutions are paying attention or not. The economics of art reinforce this divide. While the global art market thrives, most everyday aesthetic work remains unpaid or invisible. A gallery-funded sculpture is not automatically more valuable-culturally or ecologically-than a role-player’s handmade weapon or a carefully designed online space. The difference lies less in the object than in its platform. Shown in a museum, the same object acquires prestige; in its original context, it may generate deeper meaning for a smaller group. Both kinds of impact are valid, but only one tends to be recognised as “art.” These hierarchies are sustained by global capital. Wealthy patrons and collectors use art to consolidate cultural power, while the rhetoric of creativity and openness masks stark inequalities. This moral dissonance undermines public trust and fuels scepticism about the value of art itself. Yet even within this compromised system, art institutions remain essential. To critique the art world is not to call for its abolition. Institutions perform crucial work: conservators preserve fragile materials, historians provide context, and curators connect past and present. Public museums offer spaces for experimentation that could not survive in commercial or algorithmic economies. Without them, we would risk losing the shared frameworks that allow us to discuss art and its history at all. At their best, specialised art scenes do more than guard their traditions-they generate new forms of perception and thought that can feed back into the everyday. When they are allowed to reach outward instead of being reined in by markets or institutional self-preservation, they can expand our collective aesthetic vocabulary. A challenging artwork, a new compositional method, or a subtle material experiment can change how people see, make, and care for things in ordinary life. The specialised and the everyday are not opposites, but complementary forces: one refines, the other grounds. The task, then, is not purity but transformation-to reimagine how institutional resources can serve the wider spectrum of aesthetic life, while allowing the specialised art scene to remain a site of risk and invention rather than prestige and control. The art world now faces a choice. It can retreat into the protection of its hierarchies, or it can open itself to the creative intelligence that already surrounds it. The first path leads to isolation and declining relevance. The second would use the art world’s resources-its knowledge, its platforms, its funding-to connect with the full range of aesthetic practice. This means recognising the hidden alliance between the specialised and the everyday, between the coder, the gamer, the maker, and the artist. Such reciprocity works both ways. Everyday practices remind art of its grounding in lived experience; specialised art, when freed from institutional constraint, can re-enchant the everyday with new possibilities of form and thought. If art is everywhere people shape meaning from matter, then its value cannot be announced from above. It must be built collectively, through shared attention and new languages of criticism. Seen this way, art becomes not a distant category but a field of relation-a space where form, weirdness, care, and speculation continually meet and remake the world. #stuffiwonderabout ##tingjegspørgermigselvom