Nail Art and the Hierarchies of Taste
Who gets to define art, and whose forms of expression are granted legitimacy?
Art has always been entangled with power. The distinction between “high art” and “low art” has less to do with inherent value than with the social hierarchies that define what counts as “sophisticated,” “worthy,” or “beautiful.”
Central to this process is “taste”—a mechanism by which elites delineate themselves from the masses. Nail art exposes this dynamic in sharp relief: its association with Black, working-class identities leads to its exclusion from the canon, not because it lacks sophistication, but because it originates outside dominant cultural centres.
For centuries, elite cultural institutions have elevated painting, sculpture, and classical music as the pinnacle of “civilisation,” while relegating artistic expressions associated with marginalised communities to the realm of the trivial.
Despite its technical mastery, creativity, and expressive depth, nail art is rarely recognised in museums or art history curricula. Instead, it is often coded as “ghetto,” or “low-class”. These labels are less aesthetic judgments than racialised, classist mechanisms of exclusion.
To call something “ghetto” or “unsophisticated” is to position whole communities outside the realm of cultural legitimacy. Black women have long innovated bold, intricate, and deeply symbolic styles of nail art. Acrylic sets, jewelled embellishments, and hand-painted patterns demand technical skill and creativity equal to any traditional art form, yet despite their sophistication, these designs are routinely dismissed as frivolous, excessive, or vulgar.
This asymmetry exposes how aesthetic hierarchies enforce social ones. When nail art is dismissed, the bodies and identities tied to it are also devalued. Taste becomes a weapon that marks certain forms of beauty—and by extension, certain people—as legitimate, while rendering others invisible. To deny nail art its place in the category of art is to deny recognition to the communities whose creativity sustains it.