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Art and Classism: When culture forgets those who live it, it’s not lack of interest, it’s exclusion.

  • Greta Futura
  • Nov 7, 2025
  • 5 min read

Yesterday I met with Yasmin and Bea, a writer and photographer I’m collaborating with for an upcoming Mulieris editorial. I’ve been in London since February, partly to work closely on the next print issue of our magazine, and our conversation brought up a reflection I wanted to share about the intersection of art and class.


As we spoke about our careers and how we shifted into our artistic research Yasmin said something that resonated with a turning point I’ve experienced too: “I used to think I didn’t like art. But when I finally had access to art made by someone like me, I realized that wasn’t true. I didn’t hate art, I just hadn’t been shown art that was ever meant for people like me.”

In the art world, classism isn’t a detail, it’s structural. It’s not just a matter of taste or personal inclination, but of access, representation, and recognition. The following morning I shared with Yasmin a statement from the new mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani: “Art can’t just be a luxury for the few. That requires a city where artists can actually afford their rent, groceries, childcare, and transit”. I told her how perfectly those words captured what we’d been talking about the night before and she replied: “It’s incredible to finally see someone in politics open up this conversation.”


I think this kind of conversation feels even more uncomfortable in our private lives rather than in politics. Too often, I’ve felt forced to pretend I belonged to a different class than the one I grew up in. When I was a teenager in Florence, I used to buy branded clothes from thrift stores (before it was considered cool, when it just meant you were broke) because I wanted the same Abercrombie sweats as my classmates, the ones who could afford trips to New York at 15 and came back with matching hoodies as "trophies". Later, when I began working in art and fashion, I kept disguising myself in various ways just to blend into the spaces I wanted so desperately toto fit into. If only I looked like them, maybe at some point I could also reach the same level of recognition.

Years after graduating, I still feel anger towards having gone to a public art academy instead of the private university I actually wanted to attend, the one with the classes that inspired me, the one that could have given me the right connections. I ended up studying to a public university because my family’s income made the tuition practically free, and I could reach it with an hour long train ride from my hometown since I could not afford housing at the moment. Almost seven years later, I’ve now taught, led workshops, and spoken on panels inside those same private universities I once couldn’t afford. I thought that would feel like revenge, the place that excluded me now values my expertise, but nothing has changed. Back then, I couldn’t afford to study there; today, as a guest lecturer, I’m underpaid or often not paid at all. I’m still bound to the same class I came from, still trying to blend in with theirs. Whether I sit in front of the classroom or behind it that space remains inaccessible to me.


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Living in a city like London, where, unlike Milan, the culture of “grinding,” of being “self-made,” is idolized, where coming from nothing is seen as a strength rather than a shadow that follows you around, has in some ways relieved me of the shame I carried for almost thirty years of my life. A shame that felt heavy not only toward myself but toward those who raised me, who might feel they hadn’t done enough for me, just as I’ve often felt I wasn’t enough for this society. For most of my life, I’ve hidden my social class, almost ashamed of it, both in conversations with people close to me and in professional settings.

I’ve always loved art as a form of expression and made it my work, but rarely do the spaces I enter reflect my lived experience. More often, they’re yet another reminder that these systems aren’t built for people like me. I should feel like I’ve made it, but that illusion disappeared the moment I acknowledged the reality of where I come from, and where most of us are still confined. How can I sit at a table where the conversation shifts between someone’s third property acquisition and the fifth vacation of the year, wearing a look worth an average person’s annual salary, and then go home to a place I can barely afford, to someone I love who doesn’t know how to make it to the end of the month? Even when I gained access to that class I once envied, all I felt was the urge to detach from it.


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What we commonly call intellectualism or art, especially within narrow literary and artistic circles, isn’t necessarily an expression of deeper thought, sharper critique, or greater sensitivity than the so called masses. More often, it’s the elitist reflection of a system of privilege: of opportunities, of access to culture, of the symbolic capital tied to the class we are born into. These environments, which present themselves as spaces of inquiry and freedom, often end up erecting new barriers, preserving a language and an aesthetic accessible only to a few. In doing so, art and literature risk losing their original power: that of connection and shared experience.

Before it was ever an aesthetic act, art was a spiritual need. As early as the Paleolithic, Homo erectus developed symbolic thought, an awareness that led him to question life and death. That’s where we can glimpse the birth of Homo religiosus, the human being capable of assigning invisible meaning to the visible world. With the first burial rites and cave engravings, humans began to represent what surrounded them and what they desired: animals, hunting scenes, mysterious figures. But these weren’t yet “art” in the aesthetic sense. They were tools of connection with the invisible, magical, ritual acts meant to influence reality. Alongside the first religious feelings came the ability to symbolize, to see in objects and images something beyond their practical use. In this way, art emerged as one of humanity’s earliest languages, not to decorate, but to believe, to hope, to speak to what cannot be touched.


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That collective, ritual origin feels distant from how we often understand art today. In recent years, debates around the relationship between the artist and their work between ethical responsibility and aesthetic value have grown louder. Can we really separate one from the other? And more importantly, can art exist without engaging with the collective, without acknowledging its own time, politics, and society? Isn’t one of the strongest symbols of our era precisely the tension between the individual and the collective?

Art that doesn’t reflect the community it comes from risks becoming an elitist product, closed off, incapable of truly reaching those who encounter it. Because, just like at the dawn of humanity, art only has meaning when it speaks about us, when, through its symbols, it allows us to recognize ourselves in one another.

If once I felt out of place in front of the art I saw, today I find myself wondering instead about the person behind it and how much their world can actually touch mine.


When culture forgets those who live it, it’s not lack of interest, it’s exclusion.



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