Identity Crisis and the Art World

Coping with the disillusionment of 2024.

I love a divisive article; virality reassures me that people still like to read. The polarizing sensation of 2024 was without a doubt “The Painted Protest,” Dean Kissick’s essay in Harper’s about how art sucks now because woke. He was not the first to say this; from early in 2024, these were the prevailing sentiments among critics of both the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale. But Kissick’s piece had a special resonance with certain corners of the art world, having articulated the gnawing sense of alienation they were feeling.

It’s called mid-life crisis.

Mapped onto the art world’s decline as its narrative structure, “Painted Protest” is a story about the requisite traumas of entering your early 40s: the tragic near-death of an aging parent; the disappearance of youthful thrills; and wistful nostalgia for your twenties and all its unrealized potential. Naming the rise of identity politics as its improbable villain, Kissick’s story prompted lively and widespread debate. People read and discussed the fuck out of this thing, penning their own essays and highlighting passages on social media. The three main reactions, in the most reductive terms, were Dean is right, Dean is racist, or Dean is racist, but the guy’s got a point.

The essay drew out our collective feelings of estrangement and disappointment in the art world. But the number of people who agreed with Dean so uncritically shocked me, to be honest. Their resounding sentiment was that they were sick to death of this identity shit—I mean truly we all were, but these people sounded resentful.

Where disillusionment can feel like an interminable void with neither horizon nor direction, blame is a convenient way of externalizing otherwise unresolvable grief. It’s important, however, to choose our villains wisely. I will say Dean is right, art sucks now. But Dean is wrong, politics did not destroy art. Money destroyed art as well as politics, which should be fairly obvious by now.

Out: representation, identity politics, Democrats, cancelation
In: reparations, anti-immigrant sentiment, art world shrinkflation (i.e., smaller paintings for the same prices)

In Miami, unlike in 2016, when everyone was openly grieving Trump’s first election, no one was in the mood to talk about politics or feelings. No one was really in the mood to party either, preferring to grieve silently in the privacy of their hotel beds. Sales were okay at best, soul-crushing at worse, and the fabled Trump Bump turned out to be just that.

We end 2024 in the later stages of something I’ve watched over the last year or two: a gradual atomization and withdrawal of empathy as political and economic anxieties rise. I mean let’s be honest, we’ve been lying about being in a recession for at least the last two years.

In the election’s immediate fallout, when Onion headlines read “Still Too Early To Know Which Minority To Scapegoat,” corporate media infographics told us it was safe to blame male Latino voters and wish deportation on their families. Even voices within the art world said we need to cool it with the pronouns if we want to start winning elections. To make sense of their loss, they were externalized their grief downward, preemptively throwing the most at risk among us under the bus. Why? I don’t know—to me it’s clear that the people in charge are to blame. It was a needlessly catastrophic election. Rancid McDonald’s versus rancid foie gras. I don’t know in what world you’d expect Americans to choose foie gras.

Out: mindless consumption, brand names, grad school, trigger warnings
In: visual and media literacy, fiber art, analog, tradwifery

Admittedly it’s a cliche to say things were so much better in the past. But you can reach out and feel the objective decline in quality of almost everything: wool, produce, water, handbags, Google, infrastructure, care, shoes, airplanes. In the footsteps of fast food and fast fashion, fast art was almost inevitable, and ideas of identity became a sort of fast politics, too.

Would breaking up the big banks, end racism, sexism and LGBTQ discrimination? Hillary Clinton asked in 2016, planting a false dichotomy that would bury the class war with the culture war. The climate was right for identity politics to become a profitable branding tool, and the art market was quick to catch on. They reduced race and ethnicity to the point where every few months, Artsy and the New York Times would announce which ones were trending.

Enough! the white critics of the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale cried, but not in any kind of virtuous way; they simply could not put forth the energy to look at the art past the artists’ identities.

Please note the humor in white critics 1) losing interest in diversity at the same time as the market and 2) not recognizing whiteness as an identity, but immediately noticing when whiteness is absent.

Art really changed because patronage changed: the point of collecting shifted from supporting artistic experimentation to investing for profit, and the illusion of social progress masked the decline in quality.

Following two decades of aggressive financialization, unfortunately, collectors have come to the widespread realization that 90 percent of this shit is destined to be worthless.

Where the art market goes now is hard to say. In my ideal world, it shrinks to accommodate only the people who really care and abandons the false promise of endless growth. Much more likely, when the next wave of speculators comes around, they’ll be welcomed with open arms.

Out: serial killers, conspiracy theories, Klaus Biesenbach, consensus
In: political assassinations, prophecies, Nan goldin, coalition

At age 26, Luigi Mangione accomplished so much during such a brief time on earth. He did the unthinkable in early December and resuscitated broadcast journalism from its steep post-election decline. His alleged* murder of an insurance CEO also gave disillusioned Americans the hero they badly needed, reorienting their anger upward to the American healthcare system. Showing the people their true common enemy was enough to unite the divided, as well as tide us over until the next White Lotus. We’ve been hurting for a hit TV show for a while.

*we actually don’t know that he did it.

But murder is wrong! Detractors will say. Yes, and withholding life-saving care for profit is murder. Through school shootings, predatory insurance, and the burying alive of Palestinians, Americans have already surrendered to murder as a daily and unpreventable part of life. There is no backtracking now.

But you’re just glorifying Mangione’s privilege! It’s true. Today, there are endless Black and brown revolutionaries languishing in prison outside of the spotlight. But the false dichotomy between the class war and the culture war is so 2024. In 2025, we need more handsome white Ivy League potential bisexuals with immaculate criminal records to take the fall on our behalf. Less scapegoating of the marginalized, more voluntary sacrificial lambs.

The worst art I saw in 2024

“Jenny Holzer: Light Line” at the Guggenheim
So big and so flashy, yet surprisingly unmemorable.

“Olafur Eliasson: OPEN” at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
So much science project, so little art.

“Olivia Erlanger: If Today Were Tomorrow” at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston

Aggressively soulless and detached from its materials.

“Doug Aitken: Lightscape” at the Marciano Foundation
I like Doug, but I’ve never heard so many people at an opening say the artist “should try making Apple commercials.” This was our punishment for returning to this cursed place.

Best Art I saw in 2024

Hands down, *Christophe Büchel’s “Monte di Pietà” at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, a perfect representation of our toxic dependence on borrowed money and worthless art. I have a two- or three-thousand-word review in my drafts right now, and someday I might even hit publish.

Also: Miles Greenberg, Sebastian, 2024; *Paul McCarthy, The Garden, 91-92; Damien Hirst, Nothing is a Problem for me, 1992; *Matthew Barney, Cremaster 4, 1995; “*Theaster Gates: The Gift and The Renege” at CAMH; Kraftwerk, Andre 3000 and Harmony Korine live; “Gretchen Bender: Perversion of the Visual” at Sprüth Magers; “*Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” at The Broad; *Ligia Lewis, A Plot/A Scandal, 2023; “Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom” at MOCA Geffen; Pierre Huyghe, Human Mask, 2014; Massimo Bartolini, Conveyance, 2024 in the Italian Pavilion; Moffat Takadiwa’s Pavilion of Zimbabwe; Julia Isídrez, Juana Marta Rodas, and Disobedience Archive in the Venice Arsenale.

*denotes identity-based practice

To the disappointment of many, there was no superstar work in Venice this year, only a constellation of little stars, a chorus of voices harmonizing across different continents and points in time. But I loved the Venice Biennale. The prevalence of textiles underscored the unlikely connective threads Adriano Pedrosa had drawn between different nationalities and generations, and the fine line between craft and abstraction. So many small-scale, low-tech works were quietly profound.

We seek out the art of the future under the false impression that time only marches forward, and the hubristic assumption that history has nothing to teach us. Pedrosa’s biennale offered not the art we wanted, but the art that we needed, now more than ever as we lose sight of the point in the backwards slide of civilization. These folkloric indigenous works, running parallel to the Catholic iconography of Venice, take us back to art’s original spiritual function: to make sense of the human experience; to find meaning in the imagination; to transcend the miseries of our otherwise useless time on earth.

The ideal 2025

There are certain seismic cultural events that kind of crack the earth wide open, allowing new world orders to emerge. These include both the meteor that triggered the dinosaur’s extinction, Mangione’s alleged* shooting, and 9/11. According to my friend Leigh Raiford, in this century alone, the world has already ended and been remade at least half a dozen times. The election fallout even prompted Jerry Saltz to question the establishment, potentially radicalizing him in real time.

I would not describe this moment as a shift toward the right, but the complete reorientation of our two-party system—I knew it the second Amber Rose walked out on that RNC stage. My extremely sentimental proposal is to pause for a minute and imagine the world you want to live in—what does it look like, what does it value, who does it include—and write it down. When the grief of disillusionment feels like the total absence of purpose or direction, this can be your anchor. In this moment where literally everything is possible, now is the time to tell the truth about our ideals. This is the time to be brave.