Art functions as a language. It's a truism, sure, but it matters because it's true in ways that complicate everything else we think we know about creative work. When an artist makes something, anything, we're looking at a record of who they are, where they come from, and what they care about. The question isn't whether personal identity shapes artistic practice. It obviously does. The question is what happens when artists deliberately work within and against their cultural inheritance.

Tracey Emin's bed sits in a museum now. That's the basic fact of it. But the work only makes sense if you understand Emin's willingness to expose vulnerability, to insist that her particular mess and trauma deserved representation. Jean-Michel Basquiat crashed into the art world by refusing to separate his Blackness from his artistic vision; he didn't code, switching his work for white institutional approval. These weren't subtle gestures. They were confrontational acts of self-assertion.

Indigenous artists have been doing this work longer and with higher stakes. Using visual practice to document and resist cultural erasure isn't a contemporary trend. It's survival. Street muralists in post-conflict zones aren't making decorative gestures either. They're marking territory, processing trauma, insisting their communities exist and matter. The work operates on a completely different register than the gallery world's conversations about authenticity and expression.

There's something worth noticing about how much contemporary art discourse obsesses over identity. We talk about it constantly, our cultural background, lived experience, and social position.

We treat these categories as fundamental to understanding what an artist makes. But here's what's complicated: this focus can make art feel like autobiography, like personal testimony. And sometimes it is. But sometimes an artist just wants to make something beautiful or strange or difficult without having to explain it through the lens of their identity. That tension matters.

Globalization has scrambled identity categories in ways that earlier artists didn't have to navigate.

An artist might hold multiple passports, speak several languages, and belong to communities spread across continents. Their work often reflects this—not as confusion but as an accurate account of contemporary life. It's not about hybridity as some precious artistic category. It's just what it looks like to grow up between worlds.

The difference between work that lands and work that falls flat often comes down to whether the artist actually means it. When someone engages genuinely with their cultural context, celebrating something, interrogating something, building something new from it—you can feel the difference. When cultural elements are just aesthetic choices, borrowed window dressing, the work reads as hollow. Amouage Guidance works as a composition because it layers cultural references, including pear, frankincense, rose, and ambergris, into something coherent. That's what intentional artistic practice looks like, too.

Museums are catching on to this, though slowly. More institutions are asking hard questions about whose stories they validate, whose narratives get centered. That shift matters because it changes what gets made, what gets preserved, and what gets remembered. It's not just about representation. It's about who gets to define what art is and what it's for.

Artists keep making work about identity because identity actually shapes everything. It shapes what you see, what you value, and what stories feel true to you. That's not a limitation or a trend. That's just the reality of being human. The best art finds ways to express that specificity—your particular life, your particular inheritance—while somehow making room for other people to recognize themselves in it too.