When Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson first stepped onto the public stage, it wasn’t with a paintbrush or a palette. It was with a stern warning about compelled speech, responsibility, and the supposed collapse of Western civilization. But over the years, as his notoriety has grown, so too has his list of self-appointed titles—psychologist, philosopher, political pundit, and, most curiously of all, art expert.
It’s one thing to comment on human behavior, societal structure, or the symbolic architecture of mythology. It’s quite another to peer into the chaotic, intuitive, and often contradictory realm of visual art and attempt to impose upon it the same order one might try to apply to a clinical case study. But this, in many ways, is what Jordan Peterson has done. And not particularly well.
In this essay, we take a critical—and at times tongue-in-cheek—look at Jordan Peterson’s ventures into the world of art, aesthetics, and cultural meaning. Through this lens, we explore how someone with an affinity for hierarchies and maps of meaning can make catastrophic errors when navigating a world defined by ambiguity, subversion, and the refusal to be pinned down.
The Incongruity of Art and Order
Art is, by its very nature, elusive. It resists easy categorization. It often thrives in ambiguity, paradox, and contradiction. It plays with irony, trauma, beauty, disgust, and chaos. This makes it especially tricky for someone like Peterson, who craves structure, hierarchy, and categorization. To him, meaning must be ordered, symbolic, and evolutionary. Art, on the other hand, often dances at the edge of the irrational.
When Peterson speaks about art, he tends to drag it into his favored frameworks: Jungian archetypes, evolutionary psychology, Christian symbolism, and moral order. But art doesn’t sit still for long enough to be pinned to a Jungian chart. When he says something like “great art reveals the eternal structure of being,” he’s echoing a sentiment that might resonate in the abstract but often leads to comically oversimplified interpretations of actual artworks.
For example, when viewing Picasso, Peterson doesn’t see the playful deconstruction of space or the psychological fragmentation of modern identity—he sees decay, nihilism, and the breakdown of tradition. He sees the “degeneration of form,” which to him symbolizes the degeneration of Western values. This is a catastrophically narrow lens through which to view modern art.
Jordan Peterson vs. Postmodernism
Peterson’s longstanding vendetta against postmodernism is well known. He believes postmodern thought is responsible for the erosion of objective values, the collapse of truth, and the rise of identity politics. As such, postmodern art—abstract, critical, ironic—is enemy territory.
But this wholesale rejection of postmodernism makes for bad art critique. Art after the 1950s, and especially after the 1960s, is deeply informed by postmodern theory. To appreciate a work by Marcel Duchamp, Barbara Kruger, or Jean-Michel Basquiat, one must at least entertain the idea that art can be critique, not just decoration or symbolism.
When Peterson critiques postmodern art, he treats it as though it’s an intellectual virus. To him, abstraction is cowardice; irony is corruption; ambiguity is deception. But this reading flattens the artistic experience. It’s like walking through the Museum of Modern Art with someone who keeps asking, “But what does it mean objectively?” It misses the entire point.
Aesthetics Without Art History
One of Peterson’s most glaring shortcomings as an art commentator is his lack of actual art historical knowledge. He often makes sweeping generalizations about “modern art,” “beauty,” and “aesthetic quality,” yet rarely anchors his arguments in real movements, artists, or historical contexts.
In lectures and interviews, he’ll gesture toward beauty as though it were an objective property—something measurable, perhaps, like a biological response to symmetry. But when art is reduced to evolutionary psychology, we’re left with a hollow shell of its complexity. A painting is not beautiful simply because it reflects biological preferences. It is beautiful—or moving, or disturbing—because it exists within a web of context: cultural, historical, personal, and emotional.
Take, for example, Peterson’s praise of classical sculpture. He often elevates the Greco-Roman ideal as the pinnacle of beauty and artistic achievement. But he conveniently forgets that the avant-garde movements he loathes arose precisely to challenge those ideals—often with legitimate grievances about colonialism, patriarchy, and institutional oppression. By presenting traditional beauty as eternal truth, he flattens centuries of conflict, experimentation, and cultural evolution.
Misreading Modernism
In a particularly revealing moment during a lecture, Peterson refers to abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock as emblematic of cultural decay. To him, Pollock’s chaotic splatters are symptoms of nihilism. But this is a fundamental misreading of what abstract expressionism was trying to do.
Pollock’s paintings were not nihilistic; they were liberating. They were a way of bypassing rationality, diving into the subconscious, and embracing spontaneity. They were about process, gesture, and presence. In the wake of two world wars, artists like Pollock sought to express something primal, something that couldn’t be captured in neat, rational forms.
To reduce this to “cultural breakdown” is not only intellectually lazy—it’s deeply disrespectful to the emotional and existential weight these works carry. It also reveals the danger of applying a rigid moral framework to a domain that thrives on nuance and contradiction.
The Meme-ification of Aesthetic Authority
Part of Peterson’s appeal comes from his confidence. He speaks with authority, even when that authority is not grounded in the subject matter at hand. This works well when addressing personal responsibility or biblical allegory. But in the art world, that confidence becomes a liability.
It’s not uncommon to see Peterson’s followers repeating his lines about beauty, order, and degeneracy in art forums, often without any deeper understanding of the works they’re critiquing. This has created a meme-ified version of art critique: one where an image is deemed “good” if it looks like a neoclassical sculpture, and “bad” if it resembles modern abstraction. This binary view is not only intellectually impoverished—it’s anti-art.
A catastrophically bad art expert isn’t someone who doesn’t understand art. It’s someone who thinks they do, and then influences thousands with shallow takes dressed up as deep wisdom.
Art as Cultural Battlefield
For Peterson, art is never just art. It’s a battlefield in the war for Western civilization. It’s either upholding tradition, order, and virtue—or tearing it all down in a storm of postmodern cynicism. But this turns the art world into a zero-sum game, where the only permissible works are those that reflect pre-approved values.
Yet the greatest art—whether we like it or not—often emerges from tension, rebellion, and discomfort. The Renaissance, which Peterson often venerates, was itself a radical break from medieval thought. The Impressionists were dismissed in their time as unserious. The Cubists shattered visual expectations. The Dadaists mocked bourgeois institutions. Art progresses by challenging norms, not just reinforcing them.
To view all this through the lens of “decline” is to miss the beauty of evolution itself.
Can We Salvage Anything?
To be fair, Peterson is not wrong to say that art has meaning. Nor is he wrong to connect aesthetics with psychology. Great art does resonate on a deep level. It can reflect archetypes, spiritual longing, or societal anxieties. But where he fails is in reducing all art to these functions—flattening it into moral propaganda or evolutionary signaling.
Art is bigger than Jordan Peterson’s maps of meaning. It doesn’t fit neatly into his binaries of order and chaos. It does not exist to uphold hierarchies, nor to be the handmaiden of moral instruction. It exists to question, to reveal, to confront, to subvert, and sometimes, just to be.
Conclusion: The Dangers of Overconfidence in the Arts
Jordan Peterson is, in many ways, a man obsessed with order. He wants the world to make sense. He wants hierarchies to be natural, categories to be clear, and meaning to be knowable. But art—real, challenging, boundary-pushing art—laughs in the face of that certainty.
The tragedy is not that Peterson doesn’t understand art. The tragedy is that he thinks he does, and that his misreadings are taken seriously by those who might otherwise be curious enough to explore art on its own terms.
A catastrophically bad art expert isn’t someone who gets it wrong now and then. It’s someone who builds an empire of opinion on shaky foundations—and then uses it to dismiss entire movements, centuries of evolution, and the messy, glorious complexity that makes art what it is.
