The Vibe Shifted in Art. Now What?

We don’t need to tell anyone listening that it is a difficult and alarming political moment. You may be asking, How will art weather the storm? To answer that question, you probably need to take stock of how art has navigated the political storms of the recent past. And there’s been a lot of debate about this recently, centered on the critic Dean Kissick’s long essay for Harper’s magazine from late last year, titled “The Painted Protest: How Politics Ruined Contemporary Art.” Kissick first drew major attention as a chronicler of New York’s downtown scene in a column he wrote for the art magazine Spike from 2017 to 2022. In his Harper’s piece, he narrates being drawn to art in the late 2000s as a space of experimentation and glamor—a spirit, he wrote, that big museums and biennials had lost. Kissick described disaffection from institutions that now focused, in his words, on art “dressed up as protest and contextualized through decolonial or queer theory, with a singular focus on identity.” The essay has been both slammed as carelessly feeding the cultural backlash that’s rising all around and hailed for speaking honestly about an art world grown complacent. Some of this was already discussed on the Art Angle for our year-end roundup in December. Artnet Art Critic Ben Davis also started the new year writing his own take, titled “Will the Art World Go Post-Woke in 2025?” The reaction to that piece, in turn, led Kissick and Davis to this discussion.