The Painted Protest, by Dean Kissick

As fact grows stranger than fiction, we should embrace the surreal and try harder to imagine more outlandish fictions. We might begin by accepting that we are being lied to all the time, that most of what we hear and see is an illusion, misrepresentation, or performance—and that’s fine. Life has in many ways become a fiction, reality is vanishing u... See more

Art, which had previously been a way to produce discursive polyphony, aligned itself with the dominant social-justice discourses of the day, with works dressed up as protest and contextualized according to decolonial or queer theory, driven by a singular focus on identity.

As art would no longer respond to itself, and no longer had any constraints, other human activities could be drawn from the world into its hungry maw. Art was no longer moving forward. Individual artists were free to consume the present, swallow other cultural forms, and twist them into new experiences.

Contemporary art had become so popular, so urgent, so cool, and so well-funded that a fall, in retrospect, was inevitable. As soon as it reached its peak, the height of its great flourishing, it had already begun its precipitous decline.

But it is far too late. Consensus reality is gone. We are blessed to live now, in the West, in a strange world without common sense.