I’m writing this in my own register: direct, image-led, a little impatient with pretence, and worried about what gets lost when culture accelerates faster than people can metabolise it. I don’t want to simplify the issues we face, but I also don’t want to keep rewarding a tone of permanent emergency that leaves audiences numb, ashamed, or switched off.
By “liberalism” here I don’t mean party politics. I mean the broader cultural project of openness, progress, and emancipation — and the way it can sabotage itself when speed replaces care, and when moral certainty replaces human contact.
The self-sabotage of liberalism (and what contemporary art has to do with it)
Liberalism gained huge momentum in the 20th century and moved forward fast — not only in the art world, but in society at large. Somewhere at the beginning of the 21st century, it feels as if a large part of the population got lost. People weren’t swept into a new age; many were left behind in turmoil: confusion, fear, isolation.
I keep returning to an image: a girl standing on the edge of a 4-metre diving board for the first time. She’s not “stupid” or “backward.” She’s frozen — staring into the pool, overwhelmed by height, risk, and the sense that everyone expects her to jump without hesitation. Now imagine the experienced diver. The professional should look up, recognise the dilemma, and help: slow down, explain, demonstrate, encourage, stand nearby — make the next step possible.
Instead, in many corners of culture — and particularly parts of the contemporary artworld — we stormed forward. We’re always hunting for the next novelty, the next urgent topic, the next moral test. We dove hard into the crisis stack: climate catastrophe, identity politics, gender questions, trans and non-binary lived realities, and the complex social transformations of the last two decades. These subjects matter. They are real, and they deserve attention. The issue isn’t what we are looking at; it’s how we often frame it: high theory, compressed language, institutional codes, and a tone that implies, If you don’t already understand this, you are the problem.
So the person on the diving board stays frozen. And in fear, many turn backwards — not because they are inherently cruel or ignorant, but because fear and humiliation are powerful forces. They walk down the ladder and move in a totally different direction. We see that direction clearly in politics: the hardening of left and right, the appetite for certainty, the rise of “simple answers,” the strengthening of ideological camps. And we feel echoes of it in the art world too: audiences drifting away, frustration with contemporary work, and the sense that much of what’s presented is either inaccessible or relentlessly bleak.
This is where I start asking uncomfortable questions. Has contemporary art partly lost its audience — not because the audience is incapable, but because we stopped escorting people across the threshold? Because we confused speed with progress? Because we performed righteousness instead of building trust?
And if that’s even partly true, then the real question is this: how can contemporary art regain its momentum and bring people along without becoming conservative entertainment — without turning into “Holiday on Ice” or safe botanical illustration as cultural comfort food?
Do we need a broader spectrum of topics?
I think yes. I listened recently to a podcast with a very young collector who spoke openly about his focus: climate and gender, almost exclusively. Again — those are vital. But if the collecting class narrows its appetite to a few “approved” themes, and institutions follow that appetite, then entire territories of human experience get sidelined: tenderness, aging, work, friendship, grief, eroticism (without sensationalism), parenthood, migration, disability, spiritual doubt, humour, embodiment, the ordinary, the domestic, the small ethical act, the desire for repair — and, not to forget, fun, joy, love, and hope. Not as escapism — as reality.
Right now, there’s a huge emphasis on conceptual art that can be tough to enter unless wall texts do the heavy lifting. Often the work is aesthetically hard to digest, and the display language can feel like a scolding. I’m thinking of the familiar setup: a visually thin object or sparse installation, and then a long, theory-dense text block that reads like an exam question. If you can’t decode it, you feel stupid. If you do decode it, you’re often left with the feeling that the text was the artwork and the object was just the receipt.
But we already live inside a 24/7 feed of crisis. Do we need art to repeat the same frequency — or do we need it to change the frequency?
I’m not arguing for “pretty” art or denial. I’m arguing for an additional mode: one that offers orientation, imagination, and agency — not just diagnosis.
Do we need more positivity?
To be clear: positivity isn’t the same as prettiness, and it certainly isn’t the same as avoidance. And “negative” isn’t the same as “critical.” Critique is necessary. The problem begins when critique becomes a single-note aesthetic: despair as the default posture, with the viewer positioned as either guilty or ignorant.
Here are concrete examples of negativity that tend to push people away (and I include the art world’s habits, not just the works):
- Humiliation as pedagogy: the sense that the audience must “catch up” or be morally suspect.
- Didactic overload: wall texts that function like a gatekeeping exam rather than an invitation.
- Aesthetics of permanent disaster: endless ruins, scorched palettes, apocalyptic tone — the viewer leaves depleted, not activated.
- Shock tactics without care: graphic spectacle used as proof of seriousness, with little space to process, breathe, or reflect.
- Institutional coldness: exhibitions that feel like policy documents — correct, urgent, and emotionally sealed.
- Negativity without agency: problems presented with no implied route to response except despair or guilt.
And here are examples of positivity that doesn’t become naïve, decorative, or conservative — positivity as strength, repair, and usable hope:
- Repair as form: mending, stitching, rejoining, composting — not as metaphor only, but as a visual ethic.
- Witness with dignity: portraying marginalised or exploited people as fully human, complex, and present — not as symbols or props.
- Beauty as an entry point: sensual intelligence (material, colour, craft, rhythm) as a door that stays open.
- Speculative futures: proposing what could be — prototypes of imagination, not just portraits of collapse.
- Participation with boundaries: clear invitations to listen, slow down, contribute — without forcing performance.
- Joy with teeth: humour and warmth that puncture monumental seriousness without trivialising the stakes.
- Solutions as gestures: not “fixing the world,” but offering practices — care, mutual aid, attention, listening, small architectures of trust.
I also think we need “positivity” in the very practical sense of leaving the viewer with some oxygen. Not a slogan. Not a fake happy ending. Just enough space to feel: I’m not only being judged here — I’m being met.
And to be fair, some artists and curators are already doing exactly this — building genuine on-ramps without diluting complexity, and making work that holds critique and care in the same hand.
Do we need the return of craft?
This brings me to craft — not as nostalgia, but as a missing bridge. Skill has been treated as suspicious in contemporary art, as if beauty, mastery, or material intelligence automatically equals conservatism. Yet craft is one of the most immediate forms of legibility we still have. It speaks a language many people understand without translation: time, labour, discipline, care. Before ideology, before theory, before the wall text — the hand and the material make contact.
A return of craft wouldn’t mean a retreat into decoration or tradition for tradition’s sake. It would mean taking making seriously again: letting material intelligence carry meaning, letting the work hold attention through presence, not only through explanation. Craft can carry difficult content without punishing the viewer. It can make the threshold less hostile. And it can rebuild trust: the audience senses devotion in the making, not just cleverness in the framing. Craft doesn’t cancel conceptual thinking; it gives it a body.
From spectacle to personhood?
There’s another habit we need to examine: the conversion of pain into display. Trauma-objects — documents, artefacts, body-markers — can be powerful, but they can also slip into moral theatre. The viewer is shocked, then drained, and nothing changes except fatigue.
If we want to speak about forced labour, underpaid work, and social exclusion, we can do it without turning human lives into evidence files. We can make work that restores personhood. Not the saint/victim template, not the “case study” label — but people shown as people: with agency, humour, contradiction, tenderness, rage, dignity, and beauty.
And yes, sometimes that will still be uncomfortable. But discomfort is different from contempt. It’s possible to disturb someone and respect them at the same time.
Humanism as a bridge?
This is where I land: we need a renewed humanism. Not the old, Eurocentric humanism that pretends “the human” is neutral, but a contemporary one — an ethical framework recognisable across difference, grounded in dignity, relationality, and shared vulnerability.
Because if contemporary art functions only as a distorted mirror — showing audiences how ugly we are — people will eventually look away. Shame is not sustainable fuel. What we need is for the mirror to become a window: not less honest, but more spacious. A window that still tells the truth, while also offering orientation. Possibility. Trust. A future.
Where to from here?
If liberalism is going to mean anything beyond speed and self-sabotage, it has to recover the capacity to escort — to bring people along without contempt. Contemporary art can help do that, but only if it stops confusing complexity with exclusion, and urgency with acceleration.
The task isn’t to become conservative. The task is to become legible without becoming simplistic — and to make work that tells the truth while still leaving room to breathe. Not only “Look how bad it is,” but also:
Here is what care & joy looks like. Here is what the future can be.
