Why Do We Still Take Dean Kissick Seriously?

The hollow critiques of an art world provocateur stuck in nostalgia.

A respected artist sent me a recent article by Dean Kissick during one of my own manic bouts of productivity—the kind of energy that often produces a worthwhile project to sustain me through the winter. I read it with some curiosity but quickly found myself cutting through the noise to a stark realization: Kissick’s writing feels like the desperate musings of someone staring into their own Dorian Gray portrait of dwindling relevance.

The days of Ed Fornieles, Gavin Brown Enterprises, and the “edgelord” anti-“woke” artist archetype no longer carry the same cultural currency or guarantee party invites they once did in 2014. The pandemic has shifted the landscape, leaving Kissick clinging to outdated critiques that feel more like attempts to mask his own insecurity than genuine engagement with art. Even his earlier attack on Black contemporary portraiture—a thinly veiled attempt to deride identity-driven work—rings hollow today. Yes, the market has oversaturated, and yes, faith in emerging Black artists has waned as galleries commodify their stories for quick success. But to read this as prophecy rather than opportunism is to grant him more foresight than his work demonstrates.

What offended me most, though, was the implicit suggestion that Kissick’s writing warrants engagement as part of a larger art-historical discourse. It doesn’t. His essays are, at best, performative posturing and, at worst, masturbatory declarations of taste. One can imagine him, deadlines looming, annoyed yet desperate to attend the next fashion week party filled with barely legal women, ready to declare, “I write for Harper’s. I was—or am—the editor at Spike.”

In Kissick’s own words: Why do we take him so seriously?

His yearning for a bygone art world—populated by dissociative, mousy white or white-adjacent women in flat shoes and gallery pavilions of shallow aesthetics—is less cultural critique than personal preference, writ large. To him, work like Jeffrey Gibson’s—a queer Indigenous artist whose pieces challenge hegemonic narratives—becomes little more than a target for snide dismissal, likened to the gay pride section at a Spencer’s Gift Shop. Kissick’s disdain for any social progress woven into art reeks of a reactionary ethos: social justice is just another “trend” to him, something to be discarded once passé.

His fantasies hinge on control, escapism, and a return to what he views as liberation—a shallow, aesthetic freedom unburdened by equity. To him, the art world is a playground of personal desire, a space where political critique should remain secondary to his imagined ideal: “First it was the Blacks! Now the Palestinians!” one can almost hear him quip with his trademark dandy-like air.

Reading Kissick feels like watching someone nostalgically narrate the moment they first stumbled upon a nudie magazine—a mix of mischief, longing, and brute idealism. But as seductive as his prose might appear, it is hollow. His refusal to reckon with the deeper implications of art renders his critiques both predictable and irrelevant. His Eurocentric and, arguably, white supremacist ideals bubble just beneath the surface, though he seems unwilling—or unable—to confront their roots in his own mixed white and Asian identity. Instead, he uses his platform to wage pseudo-political battles that canonize his own limp propaganda.

Kissick doesn’t want critique; he wants a return to an art world shaped by shallow aesthetics and superficial pleasures. “Bring hot people back. Bring play back. Bring white people back.” This is not a rallying cry for artistic freedom; it’s a declaration of nostalgia for the exclusivity and hedonism that once propped up people like him.

Until he demonstrates an ability to critique art beyond surface-level snark and tired references, I find no reason to take him seriously. Perhaps, as he once suggested, the real question is not why I refuse to engage, but why anyone still does.