Transitive dependencies in maven

I have three project which depends on each other as follows:

project1::pom.xml

<dependency>
    <groupId>mega.group</groupId>
    <artifactId>art</artifactId>
    <version>1.0</version>
</dependency>

project2::pom.xml

<dependency>
    <groupId>mega.group</groupId>
    <artifactId>project1</artifactId>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>mega.group</groupId>
            <artifactId>art</artifactId>
        <exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

project3::pom.xml

<dependency>
    <groupId>mega.group</groupId>
    <artifactId>project2</artifactId>
    <version>1.0</version>
</dependency>

The issue is the project3 still contains mega.group.art jar within the maven dependencies despite I exluded one from project2::pom.xml explicilty. Is it a normal maven behavior? I mean do I really have to exlude the dependency each time I declare a dependecy in project?