In the morning, I got up before at least the roosters in our neighborhood started crowing. More accurately, my body got up; my mind was already crowing. The residue of the dream I had at night was still on me: My brother stuffing a wad of money into my pocket, then me giving it back out of shame. Even the dream hadn't granted me the courage to be a complete criminal. Then my body again in the dream made its own interpretation; a clean ejaculation, a defecation scene that gave a sense of getting rid of dirt. Sometimes one thinks there is no place more honest than the toilet for analyzing one's soul.

Maybe that was the issue. I had been trying to get rid of what was accumulating inside me for years. The negative, the rotting, the thing that alienates a person from themselves.

While browsing on my phone in the morning, I came across the first post. A woman who had just started her profession, whom I had met and learned for some reason that she was both a curator and gallery owner, had written "art heals" under a pose she took with two friends. I read the sentence twice. Once with anger, the second time with jealousy.

I looked at that photo for a long time. Three people, one frame, underneath it a marketable consolation.

Debord would say that the spectacle creates an "affirmed" world; one that cannot be objected to, because it even swallows the objection within itself.

The sentence "art heals" is exactly such a sentence. No one can oppose it. Anyone who does has their humanity questioned. Yet hidden within that sentence is a decision about what art is; art that heals, comforts, is decorative, sellable, can fit into corporate sponsorship texts. In other words, something that is not art at all.

Because the art that penetrated me didn't promise a postcard-like healing. It was more like Van Gogh. There was a hunger of the human soul that progressed to the point of eating its own ear. I had felt this when I first read his letters. Art sometimes doesn't heal, it just sheds a better light on one's wound.

Then I thought about the biological cycle we were taught as children. The little bird that eats the first seed. Then the slightly larger creature that tears apart that bird. Then the one that eats it. The art world was a bit like that too. What first consumed the purest excitement was always a larger mechanism.

When taking the academy exam, I was actually going to write painting and sculpture. My circle said "you'll starve." So I wrote graphic design as the first choice because I was guided to do so. They were probably right. Graphics really did fill the stomach. But humans are not creatures that live only with their stomach, I learned that years later. When the soul starves, the body's being full doesn't mean much.

Graphics made me money. Art, on the other hand, constantly asked money from me.

I remember my first painting sale. What I got in return for about twenty small jobs was not cash, but art supplies equivalent to its value. So again there was no money, only tools that would serve to produce again. Art often gives you not food, but greater hungers.

My second canvas's equivalent became a suede leather coat. It might not have been considered art, but it opened the way to my third earning. We painted the walls of a fashion designer woman's old Istanbul apartment in Teşvikiye with a painter friend; through this I entered high society circles. Sometimes one feels more like someone who carries paint in other people's stories than being an artist.

Then years passed.

I opened a gallery in Karaköy. I collected works from professors and students from the academy. I sat for days and watched people's facial expressions in front of the works. I listened to their appreciation. I listened to their excitement. Sales? That still came from graphics. Always from that side I couldn't love.

That year I learned something else: What we call the art world was actually a very small public. Same names, same collectors, same walls. New museums were opening but new audiences weren't being created. In the 19th century, in a Paris of two million people, six hundred thousand people visited a single Salon exhibition; today in Istanbul, whose population has reached 17 million, an entire biennial barely reaches fifty thousand and this was called "a good turnout." We were in a field where not art, but the discourse around art was growing. Eva Cockcroft had seen this when she wrote about the CIA's relationship with the Museum of Modern Art half a century ago; the methods became refined, the structure didn't change.

How painful it is that today critical art hangs on the walls of the very institutions it criticizes.

Art and money could never sleep comfortably in the same bed in my life. When one came, the other would sulk.

At one point I said "enough." I went beyond thinking about withdrawing from Istanbul and settling in an Aegean town, reading books and aging quietly; I packed up and moved. But it's not possible to avoid getting involved with art. This time it appeared before me with a different responsibility. I found myself within Collecist. Again close to zero income. Again lots of production. Again invisible labor.

Maybe that's exactly why I love Collecist. Because for years, within that small public, while listening to appreciations, watching how the name economy always circulated the same narrow cadre, I felt something breaking. A system where the artist had to domesticate themselves to be visible. A producer who compromised their discourse because they couldn't pay studio rent.

No one says "shut up"; the artist silences themselves.
This is the most refined censorship.

Indeed, even the previous post where we designed this article didn't remain silent. Another female curator came out and wrote "what an ignorant article, leave ChatGPT and learn the art ecosystem." In response, I also said something politely about art not flowing from a single path, that it would be good for style to accompany plurality. It was a decent response. Now looking back, I'm somewhat amused by the decency of that response. Because I did exactly what I criticized in the article: I remained polite. I wrote about not being domesticated and responded domestically. Perhaps the most refined censorship is not that of others, but that which operates within ourselves.

That's why when someone comes out and says "art heals," I now get a slight urge to laugh inside.

I don't know who art heals. Maybe collectors. Maybe viewers. Maybe empty walls. But I can't say it has healed me. It has behaved more like a long-term fever toward me. A fever that doesn't extinguish but doesn't completely burn and finish either.

I had written before:
"Art doesn't owe you dopamine, only meaning."

If it were today, I would add this: Art sometimes delays meaning too. And sometimes, its delaying of meaning is the only thing that protects it from being domesticated.

I know I won't be one of those lucky artists whose paintings sell for millions after they die. I probably won't make it to the list of tragic geniuses that the world discovers late either. I will remain more as one of those men in the kitchen of art who constantly dips his hand in hot water.

Art maybe didn't give me as much sky as Van Gogh. It fed me enough sunflowers. It also taught me to be hungry. I'm not angry at it for this, I just no longer believe anyone speaking on its behalf when they say it "heals."

S. Çağatay Özkefeli
From Someone Who Still Doesn't Know What Art Is

7 May 2026