The Highest Form of Kitsch: “Political” Message Art

The museum director, gallerist, curator, and critic are elites of the professional class. Increasingly, so is the successful artist, with the art degree now a critical credential for success and recognition in this segment of the culture industry. Art world elites navigate a world of members only airport lounges, art fairs, galas, openings, and lavish private dinners. With their fluid and stylish self-presentations and identities, they have directed the contemporary global art world to adhere to a distinctly American ideal of liberalism and pseudoprogressive politics, protestations from Global South elites notwithstanding. American identitarian hegemony, the soft face of Empire, has produced the highest form of kitsch, promoted and desired by philanthropists and collectors and imposed on the rest of us. We need to unpack this condition if we are to challenge this pervasive form of debased art and its ideological outgrowths.