This text is somehow the continuation of one that I wrote almost ten years ago, which was published in the internet journal OnCurating as an article titled ‘Are Boycotts the new “Collective Curating”?’[1]

In that text, I analysed a few boycotts led by artists intending to influence the development – or bring about the cancellation – of some high-profile artistic events. I examined the calls to boycott the 2014 Sydney Biennial because of the businesses of the main financial sponsor of the event; the boycotting of Manifesta X in St. Petersburg because of Putin’s recent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and the anti-gay legislation he passed; and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, as a protest against the working conditions behind the construction of the Guggenheim Museum franchise in that emirate.

In this article, I stated that: “Thanks to the Internet and global television networks, people have a relatively clear picture of the internal politics, institutional mechanisms, and sponsor’s human rights records from everywhere in the world.” It is significant, in retrospect, that at the time I still saw broadcast and cable TV as a dominant factor. After all, it was precisely in that year, 2014, that social media platforms started to grow exponentially. Facebook already had over 1.5 billion users worldwide. That sounds like a lot, but it is a fraction of the 5.17 billion users (over 18) today. And anyway, at the time, these were mostly the middle-aged white bourgeoisie, curious to experiment with new technology and wanting to be ‘cool’.

Needless to say, social media is today the dominant medium of communication and dissemination. But its effect is similar to the one I wrote about at the time: “The increasing number of calls for boycotts in the art world stem from this reality, where we all feel at home anywhere in the world, and feel comfortable expressing ethical approval or reprobation about any issue.” More specifically, I quoted Dave Beech, who wrote that: “artists who boycott large survey exhibitions represent the first serious challenge to the rise of the curator and the corporate sponsor that have shaped the neoliberal art institution. Putting aside the content of each boycott, therefore, we can say that the art boycott generally is a method for renegotiating the balance of power within art.”

A decade later, the role of the curator with respect to large exhibitions has been completely eroded. We can find one of the strongest examples of the devaluation of the curatorial agency in documenta 15, where the concept of its artistic director, ruangrupa, was precisely the abdication of curatorial responsibility, and with it, also of institutional accountability. The results are widely known: there was no one to discuss with the exhibition participants which works would fit more than others in the wider context of German and European culture and history, for instance – and there was no one to defend artists when they were attacked and bullied by the press. Here, we reached the ‘cul de sac’ of curatorial abstention and devaluation.

We can find this nihilistic curatorial endgame in many other situations: for example, in the closing panel discussion of the 2024 Transmediale festival in Berlin, where the curators of the festival and other speakers, instead of elaborating on the issues pertaining the festival, were asked to share their reasons and excuses for being present there and not having boycotted their own event – in the light of German policy and in the spirit of ‘Strike Germany’.[2]

The fact is that this renegotiation of the balance of power between the curator and the institution has been taking place inside an increasingly charged political atmosphere, the consequence of a canon that is shaped mainly by post-colonial and identity politics issues in their many cycles and appearances. For years, curators have been expected to ‘illustrate’ these issues with the correct artists – rather than works.

It took way too many years for a critic like Nicolas Bourriaud to synthesise this dogma, writing about the 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, that: “what the artist is becomes more important than what they produce”.[3]

Indeed, recent mega-exhibitions have been looking like a homogenous mix of live and dead artists, so-called ‘Global South’ artists, marginalised – or at least generically perceived to be marginalised – because of their gender, ethnic background, life story, etc., etc. In times where artificial intelligence is obsessing the world, the curatorial algorithm is already wired in our heads and large exhibitions already look as if they could have been, so to speak, ‘curated by Alexa’.

The problem is that normally, it is not the general public that will demand compliance with the canon, but the internal pressure of the art world, the critics and the artists. A good example can be found in the 12th Berlin Biennial, where participating artists withdrew, demanded installation changes and more.

With this hyper-dogmatic canon, the public sphere of art became a battlefield of one-sided ethics, where there is no interest in dialogues and diverse opinions, and where boycotts and censorship are a prominent feature.

Back in 2014, artist-organised boycotts would typically oppose two entities: sponsors, characterised by the source of their wealth; and institutions, as a protest against various curatorial and management decisions. At the time, I refrained from analysing the BDS because I thought – and still think – that it is different from all other boycotts, due to the fact that its demands and aims are blurry at best. But in the contemporary context, this discussion is impossible to avoid. Firstly, because the BDS stands high in the centre of the German polemics that put the art milieu in flames over the last year, but also because it became the most celebrated boycott, serving as an example for others.

The fact is that while the reasons for the BDS (the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign against Israel) are widely known – even if not deeply understood – its political aims are notoriously vague. The BDS is like a Rorschach test, where each supporter or sympathiser sees its purpose as something different. Some believe that the demands of the BDS are about giving Palestinians in the West Bank equal rights – ending a regime of Apartheid – while others will say it’s about ending the occupation of those territories conquered by Israel in 1967. Others again will assure you that the aim of the BDS is to end the occupation in ALL of Palestine and have all the Jews leave, leading to the termination of the Jewish State in the Middle East. This aim is clearly expressed in the slogan “From the river to the sea …”. In between, we might have more ideas and beliefs. It is this last extreme side of the spectrum that prompted the German Bundestag to classify the BDS as antisemitic – and rightly so – while those that support, for instance, the end of the occupation in the West Bank and a ‘two-state’ solution don’t understand why the BDS should be condemned as antisemitic – and they are totally right too. I often wonder how many BDS supporters took the time to read and seek clarification on its aims. Not many – certainly no one in the Bundestag did. But the fact is that the BDS and PACBI – the academic and artistic branch of the BDS – websites are very clear in the reasons for implementing the boycott – which we all know and lament, but they themselves leave the aims totally open.

Furthermore, BDS and anti-Israeli positions became a focal point of the present crisis, amalgamating every position claiming to be ‘radical’ and ‘emancipatory’ – but as we see, it also exemplifies the role that blind spots, double standards, collective pressure and plain ignorance play in today’s discourse, together with the lack of depth and the ‘sloganisation’ of every position.

I think that of the three cases I analysed in 2014, in perspective, we can see in the Manifesta X case the closest to what we are experiencing today in Germany, because it targeted the ‘state politics’ of the Russian Federation. Back then, the artists calling for the boycott were modest enough not to demand that Vladimir Putin leave Crimea or that the anti-gay laws be abolished immediately. Ideally, they expected a critical mass of artists to withdraw from the event, causing its cancellation. But in fact only a handful of artists withdrew, and these were precisely the ones whose works could have been more uncomfortable to the government anyway (if they care at all), making the final exhibition even more palatable to the state than it was intended to be.

But in Germany today, and especially after 7 October 2023, the demands of boycotts have different aims. On one side these are less realistic – like the demand for Germany to radically change its Middle Eastern policy, ditching the historical responsibility for the Holocaust that led to the creation of the State of Israel together with the Palestinian Nakba. But other demands are more ‘declarative’ – coercing institutions to publish specific political affiliations or remove officials, employees, members of committees, and sponsors. These symptoms contribute enormously to the total loss of value of the institutions,[4] and ultimately to the total devaluation of culture in the eyes of the general public and many decision-makers, which has been implemented through brutal budget cuts in the cultural sector in Berlin and elsewhere.

It is precisely the movement called ‘Strike Germany’ – the one that just seeks to punish Germany for its support of Israel – that resonates the most with the old-school boycotts. Artists supporting it don’t seem to wait for a change in Germany’s policies; they just don’t want to be associated with it. The point being that precisely aimless, declarative boycotts are bound to flourish these days because, unlike a decade ago, artists still can profit from supporting them.

* * *

To understand the long process that made these political positions so central to the art world, we need to consider a few different vectors that have been operating in the last twenty-five years or so, ultimately creating the aforementioned ‘canon’. As an ‘umbrella’ of some of these vectors, we can define the politisation of the artwork. Or maybe we should better call it: the ‘mainstreaming’ of political art, along with the new kind of art criticism this trend created.

We can trace this criticism to the early exhibitions dealing with a less ‘Western’-leaning art – precisely to those exhibitions that opened the art world to other geographies and other cultures. The exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art, staged at MoMA in 1984, for instance, was thrashed because it “replayed classic modernist assumptions about avant-gardist formal borrowings as well as about the notion of ‘primitive art’ itself ”[5]. Magiciens de la Terre, which took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1989, was a seminal exhibition that showcased artists from Africa and the Third World. While this show was acclaimed by the public, it slowly gained traction among critics as an infamous example of superficiality, exoticism, lack of context, and the implicit idealism underlying the idea of a “global colloquy of artists-magicians”.

Other exhibitions – and their critics – continued these trends, so by the time we got to documenta 10 in 1997, the critical machine that leaves no room for the appreciation of the artwork in itself, without centring on the provenance or identity of the artist, was well in place. Indeed, Catherine David’s documenta was also criticised for “continuing to draw the overwhelming majority of the artists represented from the traditional western European/ North American heartlands of the Avant-garde”.

This short historical introduction is intended to stress that as soon as identity issues, post-colonial and multicultural subject matter entered the mainstream of the exhibition, criticism, too, left the realm of the artistic and went right away to highlight and focus on these issues, validating, almost exclusively, ethics above aesthetics.

To be sure, the ‘political’ was part of the exhibition circuit long before the dogma we are discussing now was elaborated. Talking specifically of biennials as a natural derivation of the large World Fairs – Oliver Marchart argues that “biennials and similar large-scale events have always served as magnets for political movements, which carried out their political activities under the protection and in the shadow of the spectacle, and, indeed, proved adept at tapping into its prestige.”[6] While documenta 10 went under the term ‘globalisation’, five years later we were already talking about the ‘postcolonial’. As such, Okwui Enwezor outlined the concept of the ‘postcolonial constellation’ that underlined his documenta 11 as follows: “It is a name which reverberates in a series of structural, political, and cultural entanglements, from the decolonization movements of the post-war era to civil rights movements and feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-essentialist, contra-hegemonic politics of a new global community.”[7]

Artistically, this ambitious project would have been hard to elaborate without the massive use of video. In fact, the total embrace of video by the exhibition world allowed the integration of reality, in connection with other moving-image media: cinema and TV, documentary and mockumentary practices. Artists who saw themselves as researchers and investigators came to be central to the exhibition space, happily embracing works bordering on the documentary that could have been shown rather on broadcast channels like the BBC or Discovery.

Connected to this, there is another influential vector that grew steadily since the 1980s, which is the academisation of art and art criticism. Starting with the French ‘post-structuralist’ philosophers – Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard and others – who addressed art and art history as part of their field of postcolonial studies, along with anthropology and sociology. This new language quite soon practically ‘colonised’ art criticism and art production itself, as artists started sometimes addressing, at other times directly illustrating these new ideas.

Whether related to this or in parallel, artistic research practices started to appear in a growing number of graduate and practice-based PhD programmes for artists. But this academisation goes beyond artists’ interest in pursuing better-paid teaching jobs. In the long run, it also caused the full takeover of artistic practice by the theories developed in the field of ‘cultural studies’. Specially developed in the United States university circuit, the dialogue around these theories was imbued from the start with the typical toxicity of American social discourses.

* * *

The influence of the US in the cultural field brings us directly to the issue of identity politics – a vector that we need to dwell upon longer than the others, because we will find in it not only the root of the “Who is the artist?” and not “What is the work of art?” I mentioned before, but also the source of the fragmentation and violence we are experiencing. We can define identity politics as a political movement sustained by minority agency: the determination to convert structural disenfranchisement into a means of claiming cultural and political power for historically marginalised groups.[8]

The roots of identity politics can be traced to the American New Left movement that developed in the 1960s and 1970s. The New Left itself, both in Europe and the US, grew from the need to re-elaborate socialism after the disappointment with the Soviet regime following the crisis of 1956.

The New Left in the US, unlike the one in the UK, for instance, emboldened by the 1970s achievement that highlighted the racial and gender gaps in society with the Civil Rights movement and the student revolts against the Vietnam War, focused on the emancipatory needs of minorities regarding gender and race. In this way, instead of proposing culture as a way of developing common aims, in the spirit of socialism, the American New Left chose to erect identitarian barriers.

In the mid 1980s, while the economic policies of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK dismantled what was left of the welfare state, the American New Left was already entrenched in the new battleground of identity politics, abandoning the claim to universal rights and focusing on demanding particular rights and privileges for oppressed minorities. In doing so, the New Left stressed openly that “culture is [a] battleground” where the hegemony must be fought. The inception of ‘cultural studies’ in the universities was the direct result of the New Left’s interest in addressing the potentialities of popular culture, rather than the ideological ‘upside-down’ hierarchies of the Old Left.

The New Left reimagined the social struggle not between poor and rich, but between the gender oppressed and the patriarchy, between the colonised and their imperial oppressors, constructing culture as a significant sphere of conflict. It comes as no surprise, then, that the cultural field was in the end adopted and taken over by the conservatives, and is now being used within and against cultural institutions.[9] The sad episode we witnessed a few months ago, when Republican congresspersons thrashed the heads of the Ivy League universities in the US, using tactics they themselves didn’t know how to contain, is a perfect example of the interest the conservatives took in culture and how they learned to dominate that battleground. Today, identity politics embodies all the basic elements of neo-liberalism and the cultural theory of the New Right, rather than the Left.

In terms of identity politics, the art world has experienced this same process. Candidly and truly interested in opening their and the public’s horizons with those exhibitions of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s that I mentioned before, curators criss-crossed the world looking for artists that would enlarge the view of a globalised culture and offer a comprehensive view of the new issues in the eyes of the Northern artistic elites. But this interest soon focused on the way oppression and marginalisation was represented by those minorities. The art world became increasingly interested in artists that were, and still are, expected to perform their marginality, even as this ‘marginality’ has been steadily receding. Moreover, this perceived struggle against the neo-liberal and capitalistic system slowly became a system of fragmentation, cancellation and exclusion. The censorship and tagging, deciding ‘who’ can talk about ‘what’ – like when only artists from former colonies could talk about anti-colonialism, and only gender-diverse artists can talk about gender, for example, as it is in the American discourse, hardly qualifies as a ‘leftist’ principle, but seen in the light of this historical analysis of the New Left, we can understand the position of some intellectuals regarding the present crisis.

To be sure, mainstream, European and North Atlantic artists have also become increasingly political – working on issues that pertain to Northern perspectives, such as migration and the climate emergency. Many of them with works in which there is not much layering of meaning, rather bordering on the work of journalists and documentary filmmakers, as I mentioned before. These issues were free game for almost every artist, without belonging to the emancipating minorities, ultimately making their political view their main currency.

In my view, right now we are in the midst of a conservative system, after those minorities that achieved notoriety, in many ways, shaping the mainstream of the exhibition world, are now fighting to maintain their privileges. That is the essence of conservativism.

* * *

It is worth now doing a detour around the world because, when we talk about identity politics and emancipatory positions in the ‘art world’, we need to ask: ‘what’ or ‘where’ is this ‘art world’ exactly? Is this a homogeneous ‘art world’? Are these dogmas grappling all of the ‘art world’ – or is it only a dubious ‘privilege’ of a few countries and institutions, while others are totally free of it?

Clearly, this dogma exists only in and for the so-called ‘Western” – or maybe we should call it ‘the liberal’ – hegemony. There is a whole other, parallel hegemony we could call the ‘illiberal’ one that is growing and developing – while the ‘liberal’ one seems to be rather shrinking. I am talking about the growing number of museums, biennials, residencies, art fairs and more that are popping up in places like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates and China, and already exist in countries with authoritarian regimes like Turkey, Russia and more – in short: in the undemocratic, totalitarian or authoritarian states. Whether the aim is art-washing repressive politics, an interest in developing tourism, genuine art-loving, or maybe all three and more, it does not matter.

The point is that in all of these places, the dogma we are talking about – and especially the criticism based on this dogma – is completely absent. In a world where every artist and intellectual has something to say about any political or artistic issue taking place anywhere else, even if they know nothing about its roots, there is total silence when it relates to this ‘illiberal’ art world.

A prominent German curator this year curated a biennial in Saudi Arabia where all of the artists are vetted by the minister of culture himself, a cousin of the notorious murderer Muhammad Ben Salman, and a former executive in the oil business of the kingdom. And talking about oil – there is no need or interest in questioning where the sponsorship’s money is coming from. It’s all from the oil business, of course. Just remember the pressure the British Museum, for instance, was under to give up BP’s sponsorship – which in the end they did in 2023. Of course in this biennial in Saudi Arabia, there were no gender-diverse artists included. And there were no works pushing political agendas, human rights, feminism or sexual identity. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, there was no outcry, no letters sent to the curator, no e-flux declaration and no calls for artists to boycott the exhibition.

Just to make it clear, I do not disapprove of the curator’s grabbing a wonderfully a paid gig, even if that fee was paid with petrodollars, and I am not judging her and will not censor her either, or the artists participating in these events. I mention this again because it is a good example of how the ‘illiberal’ hegemony in the art world is immune to the criticism that became an integral part of the Western institutions – and because it highlights the blind spots and double standards that are in play here and now. Also, it’s important to understand that this field – what I called the ‘illiberal hegemony’ has an enormous influence on the Northern mainstream. This growing parallel world has been feeding artists that embody the ‘other’, the colonised. Significantly, this parallel ‘art world’ also introduced into the dogma the fictional term ‘Global South’ – that is the place where EVERY artist is authentic, natural, poor, telluric, a victim of colonisation and extractivism – no one is white, there is no access to wealth, to means of production and distribution, without the generous support of the ‘Global North’. In the Global North, on the contrary, everyone is rich, everyone has access to production means, everyone is complicit personally with colonialism, oppression and – now – with genocide.

Franco Berardi[10], the dear “Bifo” of e-flux, indoctrinates us, writing that there is actually a “line that divides the North from the South, which runs from the Mexico-Texas border to the Mediterranean Sea to the forests of Central and Eastern Europe”, that, in his own words: “has become the battleground of an infamous war – the black heart of global genocide. This is a genocidal war against unarmed people, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, assaulted by armed policemen, dogs, sadistic fascists, and above all by the forces of nature supercharged by climate change.”

There are no overlaps, no hard-working artists struggling in London, Berlin or New York. No privileged practitioners in Sao Paulo, Lagos or Calcutta. The ‘Global South’ is just another performative quality of certain artists – whether the cliché applies or not.

Saying this is by no means a general critique of political art. On the contrary, there are many artists here are many artists whose positions – even in the fields that today occupy us – are exemplary, touching and enlightening. But these artists have the sensibility and gift to translate a political situation – even if it relates to a specific issue – into a human reality that transcends a specific ‘conflict’, and it is never about themselves directly. The ‘currency’ of these artists is not exclusively political. It’s ethical, but it’s also aesthetic – and poetic.

* * *

Going back for a moment to the boycott issue: in my 2014 article, I had the possibility to argue that “A boycott is nothing more than withdrawal and is not a form of activism”. Today, in the times of social media, I cannot argue that any longer. Today, all these one-sided demands, petitions and boycotts go under an umbrella term that denotes intransigency and a lack of a hierarchical system that could implement any kind of negotiation and resolution: it’s called ‘activism’.

Andrea Fraser categorised ‘activism’ as one of the fields of contemporary art, but warned that “Cultural activism linked to collective action by mobilized groups or broad-based social movements may exist primarily outside of the field of art” and warned of entering the field, as then “it risks being misused within it”.[11] On the other hand, back then I quoted Tiffany Jenkins, who wrote that: “many contemporary campaigners calling for boycotts are from the so-called liberal left who, it would seem, want art to show a world they wished existed, having given up on trying to change it”.[12]

At its most basic, activism means action taken to create social change, but change inside an art institution is not social in the widest sense – it’s only a representation of it.

Some weeks ago, I was visiting the Egyptian archaeology collection at the Neues Museum in Berlin. There, I saw the procession of sculpted human figures carrying offerings to the next world – a perfect world of eternal life, abundance and peace. I thought to myself: “nothing has changed”. Artists are still more interested in the representation of a better world than in trying to achieve it. I am not implying that artists are not interested in making the world a better place; some of them maybe are true ‘activists’ outside of the art world as well, but inside of it, it’s always only a representation of activism. For our argument, and following the theories of Stuart Hall, a “representation” is a sign that is seen as constructed in some way, and that “stands instead of an object (or the act) to which it refers”.[13]

In the last year, the ‘representation’ of activism took over the art world. In order to protest the German policy towards the Middle East, we saw artists disrupting a performance at the Hamburger Bahnhof, instead of, for instance, disrupting a session on that subject in the Bundestag, just a few blocks away. We saw so-called ‘activists’ vandalising the home of a museum director in Brooklyn, rather that the home of the local congressman nearby. We saw endless protests taking place at different museums in NY and other cities – instead of at the Capitol in Washington DC, where the actual decision-making with consequences was taking place.

Of course, this also builds on the symbolic status of art, which teaches society to project into it its aspirations and frustrations. Art and art institutions are a magnet of attention – but exempts the true agents (like governments) from acting. A lot is being said, for example, about the plundered artefacts being held in museums – but not nearly as much about imperialism itself. Worldwide, ‘anti-imperialism’ is being addressed not by the governments of the ex-colonial powers considering reparations for the plundering and slavery of the colonies, but almost exclusively by cultural institutions. As positive as it is, this largely symbolic act in fact represents the ‘reparations’ themselves, while exempting governments from discussing and implementing more significant measures. See now in the UK, where calls for reparations to the former colonies are answered with well-publicised ceremonies of artefacts being returned, while the demand for greater economic compensation is consistently taken off the table. Unfortunately, many artists and academics are aggressively playing into this.

Capitalism and neoliberalism are in many ways built on the representative currency of art. Targeting art – as we saw in the ‘Just Stop Oil’ teenagers gluing themselves or pouring tomato soup onto a Van Gogh painting – creates a scandal. But this – in Fraser’s words, is not an ‘art system’ event – it is an activist utilising the symbolic content of art to make a point. It’s like artists who make artistic installations and interventions in political rallies. But the representation of activism inside the art institution by artists, is like an ‘autoimmune’ disease that destroys the system and has no effect outside of it.

The representation of activism in the art world is also important when we come to evaluate the success or failure of boycotts and campaigns, because even when these are ‘successful’, this is symbolic and representative. Take, for instance, Nan Goldin’s ‘PAIN’ campaign against the Sackler family, for what she and others thought was that family’s responsibility for the opioid crisis in the US. The campaign succeeded in the end and the Sackler name was erased form museums and universities – but most of their money stayed with them and they are not facing any criminal indictments. So an activist process inside art institutions got the result it deserves: a symbolic ‘success’ inside the art institution.

Art is a representation, and the art world got used to representing a world that does not exist outside of it – most probably, it is developing in the opposite direction. As we have seen, for a generation, art has been dealing with post-colonialist utopias while the new imperialism of China is colonising the African continent, in much the same way as it was colonised by the Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and slavery is alive and well in places like Southeast Asia, India and Africa. In the art world, we champion gender equality while sixty-six countries – in fact, much of that venerated ‘Global South’ – have strong anti-LGBTQ legislation. In Saudi Arabia, whose influence in the art sector is steadily growing, as mentioned before, a woman was just sentenced to eleven years in prison for “her choice of clothing and support of women’s rights”.[14]

* * *

The most dominant vector in the shifting culture over the last twenty years, however, is social media. Social media is above all a means of self-representation. For artists, it permits them to exist as ‘artists’ even if they are sidelined from the mainstream. As mentioned before, if, ten years ago, an artist could only lose from staging a boycott, today – thanks to social media – there is a lot to win because social media is the perfect tool for boycotts. In the past, the paradox of the cultural boycott was that in order to be effective, it needed to be public, but if the artist then disengaged, it lost its visibility. Today, if an artist disengages or feels sidelined or is – as they like to say today – ‘de-platformed’, social media will keep and amplify this visibility precisely because of that. Through social media, users can disengage but still be very much engaged in the event they asked to be disengaged from – that was not the case ten years ago.

All of this, finally, brings us to the ‘Schrödinger artist’. With this term I like to define those artists who seem to gain more capital by NOT participating in exhibitions and events than by participating in them. Although the term ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ is widely used, it’s worth describing its origins. This term comes from a paradox in quantum mechanics devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 in a discussion with Albert Einstein. In this thought experiment, a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead, while it is unobserved in a closed box, because of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

Of course, this paradox of simultaneity, as we will see, defines some artists’ behaviour on social media. But there are interesting instances of a creative collaboration of some institutions, like those cancelling exhibitions or those who decide to give the stage to this kind of organised disruption, as in the case of the Tania Bruguera performance at Hamburger Bahnhof. Outstanding among these institutions is Kunst-Werke Berlin (KW) where, at the exhibition Poetics of Encryption,[15] two artists who boycotted the institution in support of ‘Strike Germany’ did not disappear from the exhibition but, on the contrary, their ‘non- participation’ was highlighted by keeping their names on the posters and in the publications with a strikethrough line, and with an asterisk explaining why they decided to ‘withdraw’. Furthermore, their ‘non-works’ were still present in the exhibition space. A video work was represented by the screen turned off; another piece by an unopened crate. The wall labels referring to these works were still there. This box in the exhibition is a perfect example of Schrödinger’s paradox. As a crate, it might or might not contain the artwork of an artist that is – or is not – participating in the exhibition. The artist’s name – ‘American Artist’ – totally fits this situation – and might also exist or not – just like the cat in the box. And, talking about double standards, this American Artist – at more or less the same time as they were not ‘not participating’ in the KW show in protest at Germany’s support of Israel – was showing at MoMA, the Whitney and the Guggenheim in New York, apparently in total disregard of the US’s support of the same causes.

The unpacked work of American Artist, as exhibited at Poetics of Encryption, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2024. Photo: Spike

So the Schrödinger artist is alive and well, and flourishing on social media, trading with his non-artistic currency in another sphere than the exhibition and the institution, very possibly creating for itself more ‘capital’ than what participating in an exhibition could bring. The ideas of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu are important in this context because he identified the social environment as one that determines the value of the artist as much as the artistic work itself. He called this environment the “space of literary or artistic position-takings” and defined it as “the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in the field – literary or artistic works, of course, but also political acts or pronouncements, manifestos or polemics, etc.”[16]

I will give only one example of an artist and an event that, in my view, epitomises this symptom of the Schrödinger artist. It relates to Jonas Staal, a Dutch artist whose currency has always been one hundred percent political. He is normally active on the exhibition circuit and has a large following in the Dutch institutional scene, which is also very fond of pushing political issues – especially if these criticise latitudes other than its own and times other than its own dark, imperial and genocidal history. The story goes like this: on 19 April 2024, Staal published in e-flux notes an open letter to Mr Joybrato Mukherjee, the president of the DAAD, rejecting his nomination for a DAAD artist’s residency.[17] The reason was that Mr Mukherjee – wearing his other ‘hat’ as the rector of Cologne University, had decided “to rescind the Albertus Magnus Professorship to the Jewish-American political theorist Nancy Fraser due to her signature of a letter with over four hundred other philosophers’ names expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people and condemning the ‘ongoing and rapidly escalating massacre being committed in Gaza by Israel.”

The fact is that when I heard about it, I wanted to read the letter on e-flux, so I just did a Google search. To my surprise, the top hit was not e-flux, but the X account of none other than the celebrity Greek economist Ioannis ‘Yanis’ Varoufakis. Together with the link to the letter, Varoufakis’s comment was: “Artist Jonas Stahl [sic] takes a stand against the new McCarthyism unleashed in Germany – by turning down a prestigious residency in Berlin”.[18] By the time I saw this, the post had already got almost 40,000 views, out of the 1.2 million followers Varoufakis has on X.

So, there are a few things to unpack here. Firstly, we saw how an artist who was only ‘nominated’ for the DAAD residency, among eighteen other nominees on a supposedly confidential list – could already ‘refuse’ it by the force of social media. Then we saw Staal, an artist dealing with political currency, making a huge amount of ‘capital’ – probably more than any show he’s done – from the resonating power of X. Staal’s aim was to accuse Joybrato Mukherjee of being an antisemite, and he took upon himself to defend Fraser as a Jew. Because of that, at the time, I could easily see this letter published in almost any German newspaper, but the fact that it was published on e-flux confirms that it was just a gig intended to gain capital inside the artistic circle.

We can only hope that the DAAD learned from this episode and in future, they are going to nominate and offer their residencies to artists who really need and appreciate them. After all, as Helen Starr, who was introduced as an Afro-Caribbean Trinidadian at that closing panel at Transmediale I mentioned before, indicated – in so many words: “boycotts are a white privilege”.

It’s hard to calculate the value of these ticks on Varoufakis’s X account and how that is influencing Staal’s career. Maybe he is venerated and invited to panels and exhibitions – and maybe precisely he is being disinvited. Time will tell.

Paraphrasing what Andy Warhol famously said – that everyone should have their fifteen minutes of fame – social media scholars argue instead that on the internet, everyone is famous to fifteen people. Thanks to Yanis Varoufakis, Jonas Staal was famous to many more – maybe, but even then, for sure, not even for fifteen minutes. The social media attention span is way lower than media in Warhol’s times …

So this is how our Schrödinger artist gains capital and social power. Prophetically, in 1983, Pierre Bourdieu penned a perfect definition of the infamous algorithmic echo chamber of social media, saying that “recognition [is] accorded by those who recognize no other criterion of legitimacy than recognition by those whom they recognize.”

What to do with this kind of artist is for each one of us to decide. But in my view – and following the quantum physics theory – the artists whose currency is primarily political are quite unpredictable. Not because they are capricious, but because they react to an unpredictable world. If an artist from the US can withdraw from a show in Germany because of a war happening in the Middle East, then another unexpected chain reaction can happen at any time, and in the case of withdrawal, the artist can still accrue, or believe he is accruing, significant capital.

* * *

The short chain of inaccuracies and misleads in the Staal/Varoufakis episode shows that social media operate strictly according to the laws of gossip, amplifying words – never facts – that are seldom verified. Because much of our online social interaction is rather banal, social media researchers came up with the term ‘phatic’ to describe something that is more about maintaining connections than about conveying information.[19] The ‘phatic’ is “a communicative gesture that does not inform or exchange any meaningful information or facts about the world. It […] is a social one, to express sociability and maintain connections.” That’s the description of the ‘likes’, ‘retweets’, etc. Furthermore, “… these phatic communications may not always be ‘meaningless’, they are almost always content-less in any substantive sense.” What is interesting for us talking about the Schrödinger ‘cat’ (not the artist) is that also on social media theory, researchers speak of a “change in the notions of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ … Their argument is that a new sociability pattern of the constantly contactable [is] one which blurs presence and absence, [resulting] in relationships becoming webs of quasi-continuous exchanges.”[20]

* * *

Just one last look at my article of a decade ago: at the end of the text, I somewhat sarcastically proposed two apps to facilitate the political navigation of artists and curators in the institutional world. One was called “Rate Your Sponsor”. With this app, institutions, artists and curators could rate the application process, money flow and other aspects of exhibition-making. Curators could use it to avoid inevitable controversy and boycotts. The other app was called “Rate Your Artist”, where curators and institutions could fill in information according to their experiences of working with specific artists. There, we could even view a list of petitions and boycotts the artist has endorsed. That way, we could work with artists with no record of boycotting, or with a conceptual flexibility that would assure their commitment to participation under virtually any political stress and without them having to agree to the details of sponsors’ activities.

This last one is no longer necessary, as artists themselves are filling in data on public spreadsheets that denounce institutions.[21] While these artists and institutions present themselves as victims of political persecution, they are also effectively tagging themselves as ‘troublemakers’ that curators and institutions committed to the swift execution of exhibitions and projects should better stay clear of. And then, of course, we can always access the social media accounts, so there is no need now for this innovative app I was proposing.

However, I’m afraid that very soon we could have another list in the artist’s CV, together with the list under “group shows” and “solo shows”: that of the exhibitions and events that the artist refused to participate in and the institutional and private collections to which s/he refused to sell works; I still don’t have a title for this item in the bio, but with so much capital to be gained from refusing, boycotting, disengaging and demanding – I’m sure it’s coming.

While Schrödinger artists will continue to flourish – as long as social media exists, I must say that I have the feeling that this trend of almost exclusively political and identity-based art is coming to an end. The quote from Nicolas Bourriaud at the beginning of this lecture, lamenting the fact that the identity of the artist is more important than the work of art, is eloquent in this regard, and there are many more indications.

This is echoed by different writers and curators in different media. Just a few days before I delivered this text for the first time, a friend form New York sent me the link to a new article that has since gone ‘viral’, triggering discussions on the state of art on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. The article – published in the December 2024 issue of Harper’s Magazine – was written by Dean Kissick and titled ‘The Painted Protest – How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art’[22]. In it, Kissick concludes, among other things, that:

“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.”

So, hopefully we are standing at the brink of a well-needed change of paradigm. That doesn’t mean that we’ll go back to the all-white-men exhibition. Some very good artists of formerly marginalised communities have entered the mainstream and are being influential by virtue of their work, not by the privileges they enjoyed as marginal figures. Likewise, the ethical will not disappear, but it will live side by side with the aesthetic, and the poetic.

Besides the personal capital that artists and individuals or groups of artists are accruing in their social media representation, because of culture operating in a multi-layered institutional, political and individual ecology and on a very extended timeline, the actual success of boycotts in this field – unlike in the economic one – is rather impossible to assess. Earlier, I mentioned one ‘success’ that remained largely symbolic, and another that turned out to be quite comfortable for the government whose policy it was targeting, without achieving the aims it called for.

As demands grow more ambitious – like the radical turnaround of German policy towards the Middle East – the option of success becomes rather impossible. But we can’t dismiss the lack of ‘success’ only as such because, while not achieving their demands, cultural boycotts very often pay a price and lead to negative consequences. First and foremost, when the establishment feels it needs to fight back, the obvious means are economic. I’ve been following this issue for a long time, and I can say that there is an almost ‘Pavlovian’ reaction of politicians to boycotts: they cut budgets – at times indiscriminately.

This is not something that I can prove, but I’m convinced that the tremendous budget cuts that are coming upon artists and institution from the Berlin Senate are also the consequence of the conflicts, the boycotts, the petitions and everything that in the last year and a half disrupted the cultural milieu in Germany, and in Berlin in particular, where the cultural field presented itself as fragmented and at times violent towards each other and the system, causing the devaluation of the cultural institutions and the perception of artists as troublemakers. In criticising the system as such (German Staatsräson, for example), it’s only normal that the system pushes back, and budgets are the obvious means to do so. We can only guess what the reaction to such upheavals would be inside the ‘illiberal hegemony’ …

Sergio Edelsztein (b. Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a curator who lives and works between Berlin and Tel Aviv. In 1995 he founded the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and served as its director and chief curator until 2017. In the framework of the CCA, he curated seven Performance Art Biennials and five International Video Art Biennials – Video Zone – and also curated numerous experimental and video art screenings, retrospectives and performance events. Among the major exhibitions he curated for the CCA were shows by Guy Ben Ner, Roee Rosen, Rosa Barba, Ceal Floyer, Marina Abramović and Gary Hill. Since 1995, Edelsztein has curated exhibitions and time-based events in Spain, China, Poland, Singapore and elsewhere. He curated the Israeli participation at the 24th São Paulo Biennial (1998), as well as the 2005 and 2013 Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Over the course of his career, he has lectured, presented video programmes and published his writings in Israel, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Austria, Germany, China, the USA and Argentina, among others. He writes extensively for catalogues, websites and other publications.