The art world, for all its grandstanding about meaning and vision, is a bubble. A tightly held system of coded behaviours and curatorial in-jokes, shaped by institutional market forces, public and private alike, and the visible posturing of those who orbit them. Inside this bubble, art becomes currency. It's managed, hyped, and leveraged. Those within it often speak of access, equity, and meaning. But rarely do they look inward. They're blind to their own complicity. Cleverness is mistaken for openness, strategy for sincerity.

This bubble is policed, politely, of course, by gatekeepers. Curators, critics, collectors, foundations, fairs. Those who do not speak the dialect are subtly dismissed. What emerges is a theatre of professional taste, where superiority is cultivated and sincerity is exiled as amateurish.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the treatment of the general public. Most institutions would never admit to this, but their exhibitions often speak at their visitors, not with them. Wall texts seem written to prove artistic literacy, not stir a soul. The experience is one of deference to the experts, the historians and curators, and the viewer is cast as the lucky witness to a closed conversation. In this world, to “feel” something sincerely is almost naïve, unless it can be translated into theory. Wonder is suspect.

This was not always the case. The earliest public museums, London's National Gallery, the Louvre, the Uffizi, were born from a revolutionary impulse. The idea that the sublime, previously hoarded by the aristocracy and church, should be accessible to the people. A shared cultural inheritance. Places to contemplate beauty, depth, and mystery.

Walk through any major institution today, the NGV in Melbourne (my home city’s major public gallery) for instance, and you'll see a different intention: the blockbuster. The marketing machine. Visitors corralled and tweaked by overt visual metaphor to ensure their IG lenses stay satiated. And then, at the end, the gift shop. A cathedral of merchandise. The art is no longer the sacred encounter. The mug is. A Yayoi Kasuma print next to a plush version of Van Gogh's ear. What began as an act of cultural generosity has calcified into spectacle and salesmanship.

But it's not just the public institutions. Private galleries are equally complicit in hollowing out the encounter. Many now operate less like cultural stewards and more like boutiques with attitude. Artists are rotated like seasonal stock. Openings serve more as networking frenzies than contemplative invitations. There’s often a whiff of exclusivity for exclusivity’s sake, less an offering than a flex.

People want to engage with art. They crave it. Even if they don't know the names or the terms, even if their cultural education has taught them to feel inadequate around it, the longing remains. To be moved. To be reminded. To feel. A true encounter. 

And this is where spiritual art breaks the frame entirely. So what is “spiritual art”? All true art, at its core, is spiritual, not because of its subject matter, but because of its sincerity. Arising from depth, attunement and an artist's fidelity to something larger. And most artists are trying to do exactly that. To make something that discloses, moves, reveals. Not tell you what to think, not manipulate you into an opinion. Spiritual art invites a return to the forgotten modes of perception, felt resonance, inward movement, and quiet attunement. Into radiance. Into remembering. Into stillness.

This isn't about religion. It's about a different kind of knowing. One that bypasses critique and pierces experience. As Rudolf Steiner wrote, art has the power to awaken "the spiritual organs slumbering in the human soul." Goethe, too, understood that colour, form, and rhythm were not simply aesthetic, they were spiritual realities, perceptual medicines. Art that draws from this lineage does not perform meaning, it radiates it.

Many people fear the word "spiritual." It carries the baggage of dogma, or worse, sentimentality. But spiritual art need not be labeled. It can simply be alive. The artist who works in this space is not offering answers. They are generating invitations. And these invitations reach far beyond the art world bubble. They touch anyone with a pulse and a longing. And whether we realise it or not, in a world increasingly automated, calculated, synthetic, and estranged, the quiet yearning for something real is everywhere.

We are not lacking in individualism, we are drowning in it. But it is a distorted version. The market-sponsored, ego-fed, hustle-driven kind. What spiritual art gestures toward is a different type of individualism, one of sovereignty. Of interior richness. Of communion. Writers like Charles Eisenstein and Bayo Akomolafe are pointing toward this, toward a post-materialist, sacred individuation that is less about conquest and more about communion. They remind us we are not products, we are beings.

The great tragedy is that the art world, in its obsession with relevance, is forgetting its deeper purpose. Not to serve prestige or signal intelligence, but to remind humanity of itself. To make visible the invisible. To give form to mystery.

Spiritual art is not a retreat from the world. It is a re-entry into it armed with presence. It warms the being. And in doing so, it can stir those deep spiritual capacities in the human soul that our industrialised, commodified, screen-lit culture tries daily to suppress. Radiance, resonance, warmth, these are qualities the human soul is primed to recover. 

We need new forms of encounter. We need art that doesn't simply ask for interpretation, but offers transformation. Not shows. Not stunts. But sanctuaries. Not objects, but occasions. Art that meets you where you are and walks you somewhere you'd forgotten existed. 

That kind of art does not live in a bubble. It breathes in the world, one honest encounter at a time.