Documenta Fifteen: The Limits (and Possibilities) of Culture - Radical Art and Twenty-First Century Crises
It will be abundantly clear to anyone who has had even half an eye on current affairs, that we are living in a period of profound, critically intertwined crises, polycrises in fact. Global inequality is arguably more extreme today than it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution due to the domination of the system of financialised capitalism. After decades of its academic peripheralisation, issues of class struggle have returned with a vengeance. Disillusionment with neoliberal corporate ‘democracy’ has both challenged and fomented Left solidarities globally. Meanwhile, the same phenomenon has facilitated the ascendancy of increasingly violent right-wing racism and indigenous struggles against it. Meanwhile, mass protests confront mounting unignorable evidence of climate catastrophe. Many such protests have been met by governmental and police attempts to deem them illegal. All these crises intersect in real time and are fundamentally interconnected. Documenta’s last iteration Documenta Fifteen, touted as the ‘first exhibition of the twenty-first century’, touched on all the above crises. Interestingly, the exhibition excluded most big names of the Eurocentric and North American art worlds. Curated by the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa, the exhibition focused, somewhat controversially, on non-mainstream artists, artist collectives and ‘non-artists’ from the Global South.
Sweeping Art Under the Market
Critical art writing bemoaning a fundamental ‘crisis’ in contemporary art is by no means new. In fact, since the 1980s such writing has become commonplace. A recent article by Camille Paglia extrapolating such a crisis called ‘How Capitalism Can Save Art’ appeared, fittingly enough, in the Wall Street Journal. How exactly capitalism can save art however is by no means convincingly argued.
To produce value under Capital is a misfortune because it means producing value for somebody else.