Immoral Authority
“WHO ARE WE TO SPEAK, REALLY?,” asks Artforum international editor Pablo Larios in this issue’s On Site report from the 2025 Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, reflecting on his position as a Westerner. “It is easy to criticize the kingdom’s human rights abuses, crackdown on press, and heinous executions of dissidents. At the same time,” he notes, “there is a sense of palpable seriousness and substantiveness to the country’s ambitions to reform. This highly contradictory state of affairs comes at a moment when the West’s moral authority has all but crumbled.” Jacob Dreyer’s column on the international architectural firm OMA and its post-globalization future also opens with the author in Jeddah, similarly attempting to grapple with the seismic shifting of the moral high ground: “Many Saudis I speak to, including women and minorities, refer to a palpable sense of progress that stands in contrast to the grim political outlooks of countries like Germany, the Netherlands, or the US,” he writes.
Who are we to speak, really? It’s a question I also asked myself while walking the pristine sidewalks of Shanghai this March, my art-viewing constantly interrupted by news of democratic backsliding and attacks on diversity from the other side of the world. (How long will it be before US museums and galleries have to apply for exhibition licenses, as they do in China, I wondered? And how long until a show like TANK Shanghai’s solo presentation of Deborah-Joyce Holman—focusing on Black lesbians on film—is no longer feasible in the US? It appears now is the time for us Americans to humbly listen to those who have much to teach us about operating under challenging conditions.) From the horrific arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the barefaced blackmailing of universities and law firms, the US increasingly resembles those autocracies that trade civil rights for gleaming infrastructure—except without the gleaming infrastructure. Meanwhile, even some of those autocracies seem to be working towards their own version of “modernization”: So much for so-called “American exceptionalism.”
In his tribute in this issue to the conceptual artist Mel Bochner, who died this February, Jeffrey Weiss argues that as America “lurched towards autocracy” in recent years, the political engagement of Bochner’s work only intensified. On this month’s cover, we feature his painting All or Nothing, 2012, from a series of works that replicate thesaurus entries in capital letters and high-contrast colors—their volume turned all the way up. Needless to say, the exhortation to PUT UP OR SHUT UP! FISH OR CUT BAIT! USE IT OR LOSE IT! LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT! SINK OR SWIM! GO HARD OR GO HOME!, et cetera, has gained a new valence in our current high-stakes moment. But as Weiss suggests, Bochner’s works are also political in a more profound way, given that they examine “the ambiguities and contradictions that lurk within systems of logic, measure, and symbolic representation” and “the way those systems both shape and are shaped by values, certitudes, presumptions, and blind faith.” Who are “we” to “speak,” really?
One can find possible answers to this question elsewhere in this issue. In their respective essays on the Art Institute of Chicago’s major undertaking “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica,” Delinda Collier and Ivy G. Wilson focus on how twentieth-century Pan-Africanism circulated through visual tropes, sound waves, and air travel, knitting together a community on a global scale. Eric Crosby, director of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, tackles the turn to “engagement” and, more recently, “relevance” as the primary metrics of art museum success—criteria that ultimately deny the agency of both museum workers and museum visitors, he argues. His text reverberates with Tom McDonough’s review of Michael Asher’s show at Artists Space, New York, and specifically Asher’s elaboration of institutional critique according to a “democratic, open impulse” that resonates today. Finally, in her interview for The Checklist, Francesca Du Brock, chief curator at the Anchorage Museum, Alaska, articulates the importance of trying to “meet artists where they are” and focusing on local and regional perspectives and investments (echoing Crosby’s plea for museums to think “like international institutions with regional aspirations,” rather than the other way around).
Fundamentally, what is at stake in these texts is community: How do individuals aggregate into a collective? How do “we” build the categories that define “us”? How do individuals simultaneously participate in multiple communities? How do we build organizations that recognize us and our multiplicities, and allow us to recognize each other? How do we support each other, creatively and materially? These questions, which have been posed by artists, art historians, and critics alike, traditionally have been answered in part by our civic institutions. Here in the US, these institutions are now in dire straits: Since the previous issue of Artforum went to press, the Trump administration has attempted to close the Department of Education; canceled funds for the Institute of Museum and Library Services; redirected National Endowment for the Humanities grants to “patriotic programming,” including a “National Park of American Heroes”; and targeted Smithsonian Institution initiatives with “improper ideology,” specifically calling out the Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.” Especially in light of these developments, we will continue to publish texts that push back against attempts to circumscribe the work of artists, cultural workers, researchers, and educators. We also maintain our commitment to fostering an international dialogue between individuals and organizations who stand for art and against autocracy—not as a platform for a homogeneous, globalized “art world,” but as an international “forum” for the exchange of ideas, strategies, and hope.
—Tina Rivers Ryan
