The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art – Harper’s Magazine

It was the most depressing exhibition I had ever seen at the gallery, hardly worth a visit, let alone losing one’s legs. While Unravel pretended to be politically radical—even revolutionary—it didn’t seem to stand for much beyond liberal orthodoxy and feel-good ambient diversity. It offered fantasies of resistance, but had little to offer in terms of genuine, substantive social change or artistic experimentation. The works were almost entirely produced with traditional methods and materials, in recognizable aesthetics, and might as well have dated from half a century ago, if not much earlier. […]

The extent to which the art world has taken up these concerns raises another question: When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized? They speak for the cultural mainstream, backed by institutional authority. The project of centering the previously excluded has been completed; it no longer needs to be museums’ main priority and has by now been hollowed out into a trope. These voices have lost their own unique qualities. In a world with Foreigners Everywhere, differences have flattened and all forms of oppression have blended into one universal grief. We are bombarded with identities until they become meaningless. When everyone’s tossed together into the big salad of marginalization, otherness is made banal and abstract.