Dean Kissick’s essay ‘The Painted Protest’ begins with a personal accident. On the way to the Barbican Arts Centre in London, the author’s mother is hit by a bus, which ends up costing her both legs. Kissick, who was living in New York at the time, jumps on the first plane home, and upon arriving at the hospital, his mother asks laconically whether the exhibition – an exhibition entitled Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textile in Art – was worth losing her legs for.
When Kissick visits the exhibition two weeks later, he finds that it was not. And in ‘The Painted Protest’, he examines why so few contemporary art exhibitions are worth risking anything for. Or to put it another way: Why has contemporary art become so depressing?
The essay was first published in Harper’s Magazine in November 2024 and immediately became one of those texts that the entire art world was talking about. Kissick’s argument – that the major institutions and biennials in particular all seem to work from the same premise that difficult times must be met with political and curatorial resistance – seemed to hit a nerve: a sudden collective weariness with empty political gestures and a contemporary art that seems to look more towards the past than the present. A depressed art world, really.
A lot has happened since the essay first appeared. Trump was inaugurated as president, and Kissick himself moved back to London, where he now serves as contributing editor of Spike Art Magazine, for which he previously wrote the monthly column ‘The Downward Spiral’. In recent years, Kissick has published art criticism in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, and the literary magazine The Drift. He also runs, with artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas and curator Annika Kuhlmann, Earth, a platform for alternative cultural events in both New York and Los Angeles, started in 2024.
This week, Kissick is in Copenhagen to host a performance event with his long-time collaborator, artist Irene Haiduk, at Art Hub Copenhagen, and to mark the release of ‘The Painted Protest’ in a new and longer Danish version, published by Cris & Gulmann. He still believes that the art world is depressed – and depressing – and dreams of a contemporary art that is enthusiastic about being human right now.
When your essay was first published in Harper’s, it seemed like everybody was talking about it. Why do you think it struck such a nerve?
I think it struck a nerve because it came out at the right moment. I’m writing about a tendency in art that’s been dominant for a long time now, and I think it is reaching the end of its time. We’re in a point of transition, where there’s a general feeling that things need to change, but where we still don’t know how it’s going to change and what’s coming next. There’s a feeling that the current model has exhausted itself.
In terms of reception, a lot of people actually did like the article, but obviously lots of people didn’t too. Some people were offended by the premise or the argument, but most people were just frustrated because they thought we’ve all known this for a while. I think that’s the discursive art world context for this. But then, of course, it was also published soon after Trump’s election, which amplified things a lot.
I guess the election of Trump made some of your points seem more conservative than they really are?
I did get that critique, of course, but less so than I would have thought. The subtitle, ‘How politics destroyed contemporary art’ was a stand given to the piece by the magazine, and, of course, it’s a deliberately provocative encapsulation of what I’m saying.
I’m not saying that art shouldn’t be political. I’m talking about these certain very hollow, performative, and gestural, essentially fake, political types of art that have come to be really dominant. I don’t think criticising those models is just a conservative or reactionary position.
I have been writing about this subject for a while, but I think it would have been difficult to publish a piece like this in 2020 without being called fascist, racist, or transphobe. But I think we are in a different discursive moment now. I think there’s a widespread frustration in the art world about what has happened to art, but also a widespread frustration with what had become of identity politics and what had become of the idea of art as resistance.
I think the institutional form of identity politics becomes particularly meaningless when you have something like a Palestinian genocide, and the exhibitions that purport to be about emancipation and freedom are completely unable to talk about this. It makes the art world look ridiculous. It makes it look hypocritical and essentially out of touch. We need to think more deeply.
So, just to be clear, from the beginning your critique is not about the artworks or the individual artist, but about the curatorial framing of these, right?
Yeah, I’m talking about exhibition structures that have become a trope. About the way these things are curated and presented in the wall texts and art journalism. You know, I think that’s a big thing. I think a lot of that is either cynical or lazy in a way that can be belittling to the artists involved.
In your piece, you point to Documenta 14 in Athens in 2017 as a starting point for this tendency that has now become a trope. I remember that Documenta as a breath of fresh air, as a show that allowed non-Western ideas and pieces that weren’t necessarily artworks per se into the art world. How did something that started off so great become so bad?
I agree, I loved that Documenta. I think that was the best exhibition I’ve seen in my life. The best contemporary exhibition, certainly. It was a very radical show, an incredibly ambitious show. It didn’t pander or talk down to the audience. In fact, it was often criticised for being inaccessible. So how did something that started out so good become a trope? I don’t know exactly.
I think certain gestures – like saying that these are terrible times that need resistance, or that an exhibition is essentially about uplifting overlooked voices that have been silenced – have been used so much that they have become a very lazy framing. These exhibitions are not very influenced by Documenta. It’s much more downstream of online discourse, really. Like, I think a lot of cultural production came to be downstream of popular discourse. The high came to be led by the low, and that’s not how it should be.
I think by the time the last Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale opened, it looked a bit silly. It looked like art had fallen behind the times, whereas I think one of the interesting things art can do is really encapsulate the present or in some way predict the future. I think with Documenta 14, the curator, Adam Szymczyk, had a vision of what was going to happen or where he thought art should go.
Now we’re in a similar moment, we’re kind of waiting for a curator with a similar sort of courage to say: “I’m not just going to partake in this dominant trope. I’m going to do something different.”
In your opinion, what impact do queer theory and decolonial thinking have on this trope? In your essay, you mention these theories are part of it all, but also state that it’s really more a question of, say, social media.
Yeah, those kind of theories became very dominant in the academies and universities during this period, but you always have certain theorists and philosophers trending at different points in time. I think that before 2017 we also saw a real interest in framing contemporary art in terms of theory and philosophy, but it was open to a much broader range of approaches and types of theory. My general feeling is that it became a trend to frame things in terms of queer and decolonial theory rather than the art necessarily coming out with the theories themselves. If you know what I mean?
No, not really. What’s the difference between those two?
I don’t know if that many of these curators or people running institutions really have a deep or nuanced understanding of that kind of theory or have studied it a lot. I could be wrong, but my feeling is it’s more like a gesture rather than it’s coming out of deep commitment to and belief in this way of thinking and remaking your institution in that model.
I think people who run institutions became scared about the way certain elections went, scared about their own complicity because, you know, art is run by rich white people. They started using gestures towards inclusivity, queerness, and decolonisation as a way of protecting themselves. To me, it felt the same way as corporations doing DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] initiatives or bringing in anti-racism trainers for their workplaces. I feel like it was more of a gesture and a form of self protection. And I think it came from being very downstream of social media and youth conversations.
People at the tops of institutions came to be very afraid of the youngest people working there, came to be afraid of being canceled or having internal rebellion. And then we had this complete inversion of everything: High art, which used to be about trying new ideas and leading the discourse came to follow the popular discourse, the online discourse. An art world that used to be about operating on the fringes of society came to be about operating at a centre of society. And the museum became a place to broadcast good messaging and to teach the population how to think.
You talk about how these kinds of exhibitions claim to have radical messages, but, in fact, showcase very traditional pieces of art. Why is the media important in this critique?
The real problem with where art has ended up is the lack of radical thinking in the big institutions and biennials. These are neither radical political programs nor radical artistic programs. These are conservative programmes filled with commercial art objects. Although there has been quite a significant diversion between market art and biennial art, a lot of contemporary art is backwards looking. This idea of just keeping on pushing these incredibly aesthetically conservative forms and pretending that they are in some way politically radical objects, I think it’s nonsense.
To me, it’s an absurd proposition that this is what the radical political art object looks like now. It’s frustrating to me when we do have a political reactionaries in ascendancy, and they have very aesthetically conservative taste, that the progressive reaction has been to just show even older aesthetics. I find that to be a ridiculous response, and one deserving of criticism.
It seems to me that there is something to be found or rediscovered in, for instance, objects of a more spiritual nature coming into the institutions, even if these are conservative in form.
Honestly, most of the great work that we find at exhibitions of contemporary art of the last few years are contemporary Indigenous art. So yes, of course it has value. But then the question is: Is that what contemporary art is now?
If that’s the case, it’s really radically different to what art was just ten years ago. And we should speak about that. What are the implications if the best work being made now is coming out of the painters who have have a kind of different vision of art than what we have considered art for a long time? It means most of the museums, the galleries, and what we are teaching our students is actually redundant, and we’ve moved on to a different model.
In your essay, you write that most contemporary exhibitions seem to be fighting a fight that has already been won. What do you mean by that?
I understand that discrimination in various forms has not been solved in the world. I think the fight for uplifting underrepresented voices in the art world has been won. That space has been given. Now, we could say that that’s good and that place should be ceded in perpetuity. I’m fine with that. Like, keep white people out of the galleries. I don’t care, I’m not white. I’m not gonna fall asleep crying about that. But what I find frustrating is that it tends to be framed as some incredibly urgent gesture and one that’s really brave and radical.
Now you won this battle and you no longer have to keep framing every Black artist or every artist from the Global South in these terms. You can just start showing them as artists.
We have been talking a lot about what a radical gesture is not. But what do you wish for the next Venice Biennial or the next Documenta?
If you want to get political, you should get far more serious. Get more radical politics, thinkers, and artists involved in the exhibitions. But the problem with that is that actual radical politics involve dissolving institutions. It would be suicide for a lot of museums to actually allow genuine radical political groups into their spaces because their institutions would be dissolved in some way or occupied. But maybe that would be interesting.
Otherwise, I think it would be interesting to explore identity and selfhood in more experimental ways that go beyond just these kind of simple categories of identity, gender and sexuality, and race. I think what it means to be a person has really changed radically in the last ten years, mostly because of technology. In the extended version of my essay published in Danish, there’s a fairly lengthy passage about the Pierre Huyghe show [Liminal, at Punta della Dogana] in Venice last year, which is a good example of what I’m talking about: challenging experimental work involving contemporary advanced technology, but really trying to explore questions of what it is to be a human. That’s a good example of what I want to see in terms of challenging, bold art. Art that does not just look to the past, but finds kind of new forms of expression. Art that also explores conceptions of the self within the present.
I think contemporary art has become depressed and depressing. I think society is very depressing, and contemporary art is part of that. It reacts to that, but I also think it actively promotes that mindset and tells people things are really bad and you should be depressed. That is the message of most shows right now. I wish artists could be thrilled about the present again. There are many exciting things about being alive now. There are many things to get into as an artist.
