After the End of the World (Again)

The Diary of an Art Advisor

I was at Goldsmiths on the final year of my MA when 9/11 happened. It was the start of a new academic year, the last push toward some artistic endgame, and the towers fell. We were in the thick of our critical studies lectures and suddenly the world outside our theoretical frameworks ruptured in real time. It wasn’t that our readings became irrelevant, but they began to feel like footnotes to a louder, more spectacular reality.

There was, back then, a sudden collapse of confidence in art’s power or purpose. Not a crisis of form or medium, but of significance. A low, persistent feeling that art had somehow become… obsolete? That’s not quite the word. Maybe impotent - inadequate to the moment. Whatever the word, the feeling was real. Making art felt trite, like trying to write poetry in the middle of a collapsing building, and for a while, many of us just… paused.

It wasn’t just grief, it was scale. The sheer symbolism of 9/11 - image, ideology, spectacle - overwhelmed the cultural imagination. Every attempt at representation felt futile, even presumptuous. That awkward art-school mix of ambition and irony evaporated. For a time, it was impossible not to ask: what the hell can art do? And that question lingered.

I returned to it, years later, working on the series And This, Too, Shall Pass Away for the David Roberts collection. The paintings were riddled with eschatological echoes - not in the biblical sense, but in the 20th-century mode: death camps, disaster and atrocities. It felt like we’d seen the end of the world already - or at least glimpsed the edges – and I wondered what it would look like after the collapse? That was my question then and in that post-traumatic space, art still seemed compelled to respond - not solve, certainly not redeem, but register something.

Which brings me to now, because if we fast-forward to 2025, the horrors haven’t gone away. They’ve multiplied - Gaza, Ukraine, America cracking open like an old fault line, climate collapse, algorithmic collapse, political collapse - take your pick. You’d think we’d be right back to asking that same question: what’s the point of making art now? And yet… no one seems to be asking it. Not really.

That absence feels strange. I don’t mean that artists aren’t responding – they are, in quiet ways, in oblique materials. But the crisis of meaning, the wholesale questioning of art’s relevance that we saw post-9/11, isn’t being rehearsed now. Why? Has art stopped being expected to engage? Or are we too numbed by the relentlessness of everything to even bother posing the question?

Maybe it’s just my perspective. Maybe I’ve become too embedded in the echo chamber - too surrounded by art people speaking to art people, to notice whether anyone’s still asking. But I don’t think so - I wonder if the silence is not so much apathy, but because art no longer feels pressured to justify itself, because it’s no longer expected to. Maybe the distance between art and public life has widened to such a degree that relevance - in the broad cultural sense - is no longer part of the contract.

In 2001, it still felt as though what happened in galleries could ripple outward. That a biennale could spark mainstream outrage. That a performance or installation could tap the same nerves as a protest or an editorial. That artists might, in some way, be cultural protagonists. Now, though art is more visible than ever, it is somehow more marginal.

Gallery openings still draw crowds. Fairs multiply. MFA programmes flourish. And yet, there’s little sense that what happens in the art world interrupts public discourse, or reframes it, or even reaches it. We continue to produce, to promote, to post - but who, exactly, is listening?

The old infrastructure that once supported art’s cultural charge has largely collapsed. Critics who bridged theory and public life are now outnumbered by influencers. The magazines that once mediated between practice and politics have folded, or retreated into private-speak. Even institutions, those stately bastions of aesthetic conscience, have been neutered - by funding, by fear, by the flattening demands of relevance.

What’s left is a kind of aesthetic neoliberalism: art that operates like an unregulated market. Free from collective expectations, free from the burden of sense-making. Beautiful, expensive, and emotionally remote. After two decades of overlapping disasters, we’ve downgraded our expectations – of government, of language, of culture. We no longer look to art to intervene, only to reflect – or worse, to decorate. Art has survived, but it’s done so by withdrawing from the arena of consequence. There’s a name for this: learned helplessness.

Or perhaps it’s starker than that. Maybe the art world has answered the question - and the answer is the market. In the absence of political consensus or spiritual ballast, we’ve defaulted to what sells. Meaning has been replaced by metrics. The artwork becomes an asset. The studio becomes a start-up. The fair replaces the forum.

Of course, this is a simplification - a caricature, but sometimes caricature illuminates. The deeper worry isn’t that we’ve stopped asking what art can do - it’s that we’ve stopped expecting anything from it at all. And in that vacuum, what’s filled the space is not public reckoning, or shared cultural urgency, but… content. A feed. A fair. The image, always circulating, always detached.

This isn’t just about commerce - though commerce plays its part. It’s about the collapse of art’s intellectual and moral infrastructure. The critical apparatus that once amplified a Schneemann or a Haacke into culture-wide provocation has fractured. Today, political art often circulates only within the circuits already predisposed to receive it. The signal doesn’t break the algorithm.

So, it’s not that the work isn’t being made. It’s that we no longer gather around it in the same way. There’s no public pause. No rupture. No reckoning. We’ve adapted. Crisis is no longer a rupture in time - it’s the medium through which we now live. Catastrophe has become ambient. The metabolism of moral response has slowed. What once might have occasioned a rupture - a war, a terror attack, a global pandemic – now barely causes a ripple.

And so maybe the question isn’t “why isn’t art responding?” Perhaps it is, but the broader system - the one that once allowed art to shape conversation, policy, imagination - has moved on. Meaning-making happens elsewhere now: in memes, in livestreams, in data leaks and drone footage. The cultural agora is no longer a gallery - it’s a platform, an app, a momentary flood of outrage or affirmation. Art, in its older form - as durational, difficult, demanding - no longer commands attention. Not because it has failed, but because attention itself has changed.

What we’re left with is something quieter, lonelier. A kind of monkish persistence. Artists still make. Viewers still look. Collectors still buy. But it all happens in a reduced register. Not without beauty, not without meaning, but without interruption.

Or am I being too pessimistic?

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