We artists aren\u2019t makers of luxury goods. Artists need to take risks<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
These episodes highlighted the vulnerability of the US\u2019s state-funded cultural sector under an autocratic populist president determined to suppress artistic expression perceived as intolerably \u201cwoke\u201d. Sherald is an establishment artist, the epitome of the US\u2019s elite liberal taste. Her 2018 official portrait of the Democrat first lady Michelle Obama was a fixture of the show no longer going to the NPG.<\/p>\n
Trans Forming Liberty was recently featured on the front cover of The New Yorker magazine. Her paintings have sold for as much as $4.2m at auction. Yet faced with the possibility of having one work in her Smithsonian survey censored, Sherald self-censored her entire show. (It will now travel to the Baltimore Museum of Art instead.) Given how political \u201cconditions\u201d are changing in the US and elsewhere, where can art that tries to tell a \u201cfull, complex truth\u201d go from here?<\/p>\n
Street art speaks up<\/p>\n
One clear answer came from the other side of the Atlantic on 4 July when a monumental 42m-high mural of the Statue of Liberty covering its eyes in shame was unveiled at Roubaix, a run-down former industrial city in northern France.<\/p>\n
\u201cI created this piece after witnessing the growing injustice toward migrants worldwide,\u201d says the young Dutch street artist, Judith de Leeuw, who posted dramatic drone shots of her painting on Instagram. By mid-August, her online post had racked up more than 34 million views. \u201cNot sure why American artists aren\u2019t doing these murals! Thank you for speaking out,\u201d was one of the positive responses in a predictably mixed bag of comments.<\/p>\n
\u201cRoubaix felt like the right place,\u201d says De Leeuw, who collaborated with the URBX Festival, Collectif Renart and Roubaix itself to make the project happen. \u201cIt has the largest migrant population in France and is also the poorest city. The connection to the Statue of Liberty, originally a gift from France, made it even more meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n
De Leeuw has not been the subject of any major museum shows and she has no track record in the art market. Her style could be viewed as a bit illustrative. But this piece of street art had an audacity of conception and emotional power that has so often been lacking from the more \u201cserious\u201d works recently shown in museums, galleries and fairs in the established art world.<\/p>\n
Rarefied liberal tropes<\/p>\n
The problem is that as more and more governments lurch rightwards, seemingly towards a new authoritarian world order (a process chillingly charted by Anne Applebaum in her recently updated 2024 book Autocracy, Inc.), the more the rarefied liberal tropes of international contemporary art, with its long-prevailing fixation with identity politics, fall out of step with the concerns of wider society. They resonate even less with the 1% that generally most benefit from right-wing governments\u2019 economic policies.<\/p>\n
Ralph DeLuca, a New York-based art adviser and vice chair and global head of pop culture at Sotheby\u2019s, writing in the online magazine Cultured in August, says the changing geopolitical conditions are already making ultra-wealthy collectors rethink their spending habits. \u201cOver the past decade, the market leaned heavily into identity politics,\u201d DeLuca writes. \u201cToday, I\u2019m sensing a pullback. Collectors may no longer resonate with a particular artist\u2019s message (if they ever even did?) and no longer want to live with\u2014or even own\u2014the work.\u201d<\/p>\n
In today\u2019s \u201cless overtly \u2018woke\u2019 political environment\u201d, collectors are seeking works that are classics, or are simply beautiful or technically skilful, rather than those that \u201cmake a statement\u201d, according to DeLuca.<\/p>\n
If that is the case, the art market will continue its own process of self-censorship. Art Basel is the industry\u2019s dominant fair brand, and it is worth noting that three out of its five annual events\u2014Hong Kong, Qatar and Miami Beach\u2014are held in territories that are to a greater or lesser extent authoritarian. Art Basel Paris is held in the epicentre of the global luxury industry. Works that look good and that do not say anything in particular are set to predominate. Gagosian\u2019s recent show of new Rudolf Stingel Vineyard Paintings in London, for example, was perfectly in tune with the current market zeitgeist. \u201cI\u2019m leaving rigorous conceptual process behind and allowing myself to paint,\u201d says the artist, who has a studio in the billionaires\u2019 playground of Martha\u2019s Vineyard.<\/p>\n
Anish Kapoor the activist![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/96dd24b0e9fd609c91f1ca1185e3b60e74d19037-1843x1229.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Making a point: Greenpeace climbers installed Anish Kapoor\u2019s 96 sq. m artwork Butchered onto a Shell oil rig in the North Sea in August<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Andrew McConnell\/Greenpeace<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, art that does try to say something continues to turn up in the most unlikely places. In August, Greenpeace activists unveiled an enormous blood-red abstract painting by Anish Kapoor on a working Shell oil rig in the North Sea. Measuring 96 sq. m and titled Butchered, the work was a heart-felt howl against the ongoing butchering of our natural environment.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot so long ago, art was radical,\u201dKapoor says. \u201cAll those positions have been occupied. We have to reinvent the practice of showing art in poetic places\u2014like the middle of the ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe artists aren\u2019t makers of luxury goods,\u201d adds Kapoor, who, it has to be said, continues to sell his sculptures for big-ticket prices at art fairs. \u201cArtists need to take risks and not get stuck in the commercial market. It\u2019s important to have a deep political commentary while at the same time hold on to the intrinsic reality of the work of art.\u201d<\/p>\n
Effectively combining art and activism while avoiding didacticism has always been a tricky balancing act. But both the US and British liberal political establishment and liberal art establishment are running out of ideas and losing support. The further left-field seems to be where interesting stuff is happening. But this stuff is not for sale.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea that commodified art objects might also be meaningful forms of political protest had been in ascendancy since around 2016 and is by now completely exhausted,\u201d says the British writer Dean Kissick, whose devastating critique of contemporary identity art, \u201cThe Painted Protest\u201d, was published in Harper\u2019s Magazine last December.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are few new ideas in art, at its higher echelons, and, more importantly, very little appetite for the radically new from the market or from the institutions or critics,\u201d Kissick adds. \u201cWhere does art go from here? What other ideas are there?\u201d<\/p>\n
The contemporary art world appears to be in a moment that the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci identified as an \u201cinterregnum\u201d\u2014\u201cthe old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear\u201d.<\/p>\n
That might be a tellingly prescient piece of cultural diagnosis, but if the \u201cold\u201d is dying in the contemporary art world as political conditions change, has the current state of its market become one of those \u201cmorbid symptoms\u201d? Will the market end up with a mountain of difficult-to-sell identity art? \u201cHasn\u2019t it got one already?\u201d Kissick says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald J. Trump likes a list. There was a 20-point list of demands aimed at achieving the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[9929,4021,4020,4022,77,160815,15790,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-486125","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-art-market","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-protest-art","14":"tag-street-art","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115345235324783046","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}