Amid the 2024 election, the art world grappled with its cult-like shenanigans, as a brat summer crystallized the radical chic sensibilities of millennials and Gen Z. Clinging to the nostalgia of indie sleaze through TikTok, they positioned themselves only marginally to the left of their MAGA Republican counterparts. These groups projected their fear of erasure from high-power visibility, desperate to access the fortunes controlled by the same white men who deemed them temporary inclusions into institutions and cultural canons that have historically marginalized the “other.” When Donald Trump was announced as the 47th president of the United States, the pitchforks slowly lowered, and a collective sigh rippled across liberal America. Finally, they could disregard the feelings of the people of color they had monetized, voices they had once tokenized but now dismissed entirely.
Helen Molesworth’s praise of Dean Kissick on The David Zwirner Podcast: Dialogues—presumably hosted due to her curatorial work at the gallery (notably the posthumous Noah Davis exhibition)—is referenced in Ben Davis’s dense essay, Will The Art World Go Post-Woke in 2025 on Artnet. Davis highlights an image of Kiyan Williams’s work from the Whitney Biennial: Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House (2024). The critic tediously explores the semiotic relationship between the shifting landscapes of politics and art in the wake of a second Trump presidency. Williams’s underdeveloped work eerily offers an easy out for critics like Kissick, who have become integral to perpetuating this new alt-right dog whistle: “identity art.”
Molesworth congratulates Kissick for saying the quiet part out loud in his now-infamous Harper’s essay, The Painted Protest, a sentiment he had been signaling since his 2021 essay, The Rise of Bad Figurative Painting, published in The Spectator—a politically conservative magazine. Kissick methodically ensured his critique appeared DEI-quota-approved by referencing a wide range of artists with different identities, all while subtly questioning the black figurative painting boom of 2020. This critique aligned with Alex Greenberger of ArtNews, who also targeted bad figurative painting. Ironically, this so-called “ironic” wave of bad painting had already been recognized and championed in the 1990s when the artworld was disproportionately white.
In Greenberger’s essay, Why Is Figuration On The Rise?, he praises Martin Kippenberger while denouncing Hamishi Farah’s Representation of Arlo(2018), a painting of Dana Schutz’s son, as “revenge” rather than a clever critique of Schutz’s painting Open Casket, which depicted Emmett Till’s corpse in a funeral casket after being lynched in 1955. Both writers clearly harbored apprehensions about the black figurative painting bubble of 2020, the art world’s performative response to the BLM protests. While their claims hold weight, Ben Davis’s voyeuristic academic musing in his essay proposes that reading books by black feminist authors, like Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, would help put the art world in a better place.
Despite these perspectives, I think there’s a lot of denial in everyone’s position except Kissick’s. Earnestly, he is advocating for an art world that mirrors his version of acceleration—an indulgent yet thought-provoking endeavor. It is musings like his that create art historical lore. From Duchamp to Hammons to Kippenberger, these artists’ seminal transformations depend on their mysticism: Duchamp’s chess games, Hammons’s infamous disappearing acts, and Kippenberger’s drunken antics, laced with Joseph Beuys-like meditations on phenomena.
This is the divine masculine—a proposition that white men must exist as eternal alchemists of innovation, often cemented in the role of the artist. Their concerns are treated as more serious than those of their women or black counterparts, who are anchored to material conditions rather than confronting the abject. Women are muses. Black women are fetishistic shadows. Identity art counters the presumed nature of the white male-identified artist—a supposed philosopher in deep thought, surrounded by beer cans and narcissistic reverence for simply existing. A merry jester whose gags will be theorized canonically, as George Baker’s essay Out of Position: The Art of Martin Kippenberger (published in 2009 in Artforum) demonstrates, by thoroughly deconstructing Kippenberger’s practice as a methodical art world prankster and an advanced post-structuralist.
Kippenberger’s post-war Rhineland Punky Brewster antics can be interpreted as overshadowing the African influences present in The Fountain (1917), attributed to Duchamp but suspected to have originated from Baroness Elsa von Freytag. Freytag, an eccentric figure and cultural magnet for anything deemed “other,” her early Dada performances, incorporated Roma-inspired garb, and renditions of African Orishas in her work. This is just one of countless examples of African influences permeating Europe after the Berlin Conference. The impact of 20th-century colonialism on European modernism is further explored in Hank Willis Thomas’s Colonialism and Abstraction diagram, a critical response to Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art.
The fact that many artists during Dadaism—and Picasso himself—were inspired by the geopolitical landscape of the cutting up of Africa is undeniable. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), depicting prostitutes with African masks imposed on their faces while also rendered to emulate the flat, geometric characteristics of Benin ivory masks, a visual language that is echo entirely through cubism. These influences are merely supporting actors in the white male artist’s story arc before mastering his preordained genius. The act of extraction, dominance, and erasure is treated as a neutral given, and all that the white male artist produces afterward—and what he inspires—is canon.
We then enter the Jazz Age, a period hauntingly named after the African American created music genre that fused African rhythms with classical traditions to form a complex, mathematical modality. Jackson Pollock, inspired by these innovations, broke archaic conventions with his drip painting technique—a method he developed after observing Native American sand painting at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940. Pollock often painted in trance-like states, accompanied by the jazz compositions of artists like Duke Ellington, further cementing his reputation as an innovator. Decades later, in 2015, his painting Number 17A sold at auction for an astounding 200 million dollars, underscoring the commodification of his work and making him a genius.
Abstraction is the bastardization of religious iconography to further white dominance. Where European figurative paintings served as class propaganda, abstraction reframes the utility of Benin ivory masks and Navajo sand paintings as mere artifacts to further the European art canon. It is a sacrilegious endeavor that reduces process to a sterile concern, absent of ritual, beyond the singularity of ritual as a strategy of art-making. Form becomes an empty pursuit, stripped of its original symbolic nature, and the objectivity of material becomes the primary focus of art theoretical study.
Fast forward to the late 20th century: the AIDS epidemic that ravaged the art world begins to slow with the introduction of protease inhibitors, the culture wars are quieting, and Friends is on prime-time TV. The white male artist is soon to be cycled out as the authority on art. His legacy is eclipsed by the mysticism and slave-trading antics of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings. But there is a tint of optimism in Matthew Barney’s Yale approved Cremaster Cycle. While Pollock meditated on jazz and shamanic ritual, Barney elopes with heteroflexible subversion in queer-core references to Jack Smith, examining masculinity and mortality. Yet the white male artist cannot eclipse his predecessors: Serra, Newman, or Rothko. He is left to navel-gaze. Women are no longer interesting subjects; they scream into microphones at Bikini Kill shows, embrace lesbianism, and proudly adorn baby doll dresses, seeking collaborators for their liberation projects—which fall upon the desperation of black and brown women and men.
The white male artist is now Vice magazine, recoiling from the prospect of neutrality but leaning into his fractured identity. Drug addiction and patriarchy become accessories to his persona. He nods in approval of his shell-shocked existence, immersing himself in multidisciplinary practices: film, music, and zines. Skateboarding becomes the last community where he can exist as a white man without being confronted by centuries of extraction and perpetual dominance. In this space, he breathes freely, participating in misogyny, perpetrating drunken atrocities, and making one final attempt at dominance over the “other.” Yet, it is all performance—shaped by the legacy of Kippenberger and Beuys.
In Renée Reizman article Joseph Beuys Predicted the Manosphere(2025), they interrogate Beuys’s stolen valor, his cowardly distance from his ties to the Nazi Party, and his current exhibition at The Broad superimposing him as a leftist. A class-conscious chauvinism now permeates the sentiments of the working class art world, even seeping into the cesspool of the contemporary art subreddit. In a post-Trumpian world, a meek fascism has transformed into the virality of the Red Scare podcast and the pestilent echoes of Brad Troemel—white male artists who feel robbed of the moment they were promised, epitomized by The Still House Group.
The frustration within the art world over a supposed lack of acknowledgment would be a farce to claim. The white European art market has not, in any significant way, prioritized people of color or women over white men. The most recognized art dealers are white men, the most prominent art collectors are white men, and the best-selling artists are white men. Yet, frustration among white male artists continues to grow. This frustration can only be interpreted as aligning with the sentiments of the Alt-Right. Their stalled careers devolve into a game of finger-pointing, blaming collectors like Stefan Simcowitz—the rogue art patron blamed for the collapse of the post-internet market bubble. In classic white male fashion, they target women, queer people, and black artists for their perceived lack of reverence. In response, figures like Josh Citarella launch podcasts inviting fascist-adjacent edgelords, while Brad Troemel leans into his role as an internet provocateur, collecting Patreon subscriptions while schmoozing with Charli XCX and Matty Healy.
They still do not believe they are lauded as the geniuses of their generation. So, they manufacture the pendulum to swing back in their favor—like the Trump presidency, NFTs, or the full collapse of structure—to maintain their position in the hierarchy. Meanwhile, Dan Colen retreats to a farm, and his seemingly white male-recognized peers settle into family life. They become their fathers, trading polos in for a special-edition Supreme collaboration, possibly one they inspired themselves. Some have died, like Dash Snow, from herion, or like Kippenberger and Pollock, at the bottom of a bottle.
Now, the bitter and jaded gather at Lomax gallery, chopping and screwing post-structuralism while affirming the “genius” of Kye Christiansen-Knowles’s DeviantArt Egon Schiele screensaver paintings as a response to bad black figurative painters. The air is tinted with ketamine, and the war to maintain relevance and dominance in the art canon rages on. It’s an art world Charlottesville, swapping out tiki torches for art criticism and the virality of their own discontent.
*Martin Kippenberger. Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself. 1992
You cant understand how badly I needed this this AM, the fires are making them worse lmao
Excellent