But in a major decision last week involving Andy Warhol, the Supreme Court pushed this pillar of copyright law to the background. Instead, the Court shifted the consideration away from the artistic contribution of the new work, and focused instead on commercial concerns. By doing so, the Court’s Warhol decision will significantly limit the amount of borrowing from and building on previous works that artists can engage in.

The case involved 16 works Andy Warhol had created based on a copyrighted photograph taken in 1981 by celebrated rock and roll photographer Lynn Goldsmith of the musician Prince. While Goldsmith had disputed Warhol’s right to create these works, and by implication the rights of museums and collectors to display or sell them, the Supreme Court decided the case on a much narrower issue.

When Prince died in 2016, the Warhol Foundation (now standing in the artist’s shoes) had licensed one of Warhol’s silkscreens for the cover of a special Condé Nast magazine commemorating the musician. Explicitly expressing no opinion on the question of whether Warhol had been entitled to create the works in the first place, the Court ruled 7-2 that this specific licensing of the image was unlikely to be “fair use” under copyright law.

This is not necessarily a problematic result, given that Goldsmith also had a licensing market. Yet despite the Court’s attempt to limit itself to the narrow licensing issue instead of deciding whether Warhol’s creation of the original canvases was permissible, the reasoning of the decision has far broader and more troubling implications.

To know what’s at stake, it’s important to understand the fraught doctrine of “fair use,” which balances the rights of creators to control their works against the rights of the public and other creators to access and build on them.

What’s sometimes lost is in this discussion is that copyright law’s purpose (perhaps surprisingly) is to benefit the public—benefit to an individual artist is only incidental. The theory behind the law is that if we want a rich and vibrant culture, we must give artists copyright in their work to ensure they have economic incentives to create. But by the same logic, fair use recognizes that a vital culture also requires giving room to other artists to copy and transform copyrighted works, even if the original creator of those works objects. Otherwise, in the Supreme Court’s words, copyright law “would stifle the very creativity” it is meant to foster. Thus, to win a fair use claim, a new creator must show that her use of someone else’s copyrighted work advances the goals of copyright itself: to promote creativity.

Unfortunately, the Warhol decision took this already complex area of law and made it even more complicated. Lower courts and legal scholars will be fighting for years about its applications. But one thing is clear: it is now far riskier for an artist to borrow from previous work.

Not only did the Court downgrade the importance of whether a new work is transformative, whether it “adds something new and important” (to use the Supreme Court’s words from a previous case). The Court also painted a bizarre picture of Warhol as an inconsequential artist. Surely the Justices of the Supreme Court know that Warhol changed the course of art history. But the Warhol who emerges in the majority opinion is a tame portraitist whose work is just not that different from the photographs on which it is based.

In the Justices’ formulation, Warhol is a “style,” an artist whose “modest alterations” of the underlying photograph brought out a meaning that was already inherent in it, whose work portrayed Prince “somewhat differently” from Goldsmith’s image. Justice Elena Kagan, in a scathing dissent, charged that the majority had reduced Warhol to an Instagram filter.

Nowhere in the majority opinion would you recognize Warhol as a once-radical artist, the one de Kooning drunkenly approached at a cocktail party to utter, “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty.” Nowhere does one see the Warhol whom philosopher Arthur Danto called “the nearest thing to aphilosophical genius the history of art has produced.” That Warhol is the paradigm of an artist who brings new “meaning and message” to the work he copies, the very kind of artist that the now-diminished emphasis on transformative use was meant to protect.

Of course, this decision is not just about Warhol. For that matter, it’s not just about other Pop artists, or about appropriation artists.

Any artist who works with existing imagery should now reconsider her practice. Hire a lawyer, maybe try to negotiate a license and be ready to move on if you get turned away or can’t afford the fee. The safest and cheapest route—a consideration particularly relevant to younger artists and those who are not rich and famous—is to just steer clear of referencing existing work. Maybe that’s the right direction for art; maybe copying and relying on past work should be discouraged. But given the centrality of allusion, emulation, and copying to the history of art, it’s hard to imagine that’s a good thing. This is particularly so in contemporary digital culture, where, as I have argued, copying has taken on even greater urgency in creativity. But like it or not, these are not questions that artists, critics, and art audiences get to decide. The Supreme Court just changed the future of art.

The more gimmicky the space art, the more headlines it generates. Jeff Koons and Elon Musk—a match made in neoliberal hell—have teamed up for a new project launching (literally) this summer that allows collectors, perhaps bored of buying on Earth, to own art on the moon. Koons is sending 125 sculptures depicting different lunar phases to the moon on a SpaceX rocket, then pairing them with Earth-bound editions, each featuring a gem that plots the precise location of their lunar counterparts. Naturally, the editions all have corresponding NFTs.

If you could send anything to the moon, why would it be … a moon? Never mind that the lunar phases are irrelevant up there, since they exist only from an earthling’s perspective. If the collaboration is supposed to make gonzo ideas like colonizing Mars seem more humane, then Koons—whose shiny balloon dog sculptures are infamous for their abrasive vacuity—is an odd choice of artist. Instead, the collaboration has the opposite effect: it underscores the idea of the private space sector as a plaything for the ultra-rich.

You might think that the sky’s the limit with space art, but in fact, there are many constraints. Even Koons—one of the richest living artists, collaborating with one of Earth’s richest humans—complained about cost. His solution is the most obvious one: make the sculptures tiny. But other artists are getting clever and resourceful, finding ways to work around the material and corporate limitations.

LAST YEAR, WHEN CHINESE CONCEPTUAL ARTIST XU BING had to postpone his rocket launch, it wasn’t due to the technical delays that are all but expected with such a complex feat of engineering. Instead, it was because Chinese officials required the artist to prove, before sendoff, that the Chinese-looking characters painted on the rocket’s exterior were indeed, as Xu claimed, nonsense. If he were sending a secret message to the world—or to extraterrestrials—the government didn’t want to be the last to know.

This was challenging. How do you prove that something is nonsense? The prompt stumped the artist for a while, until he reframed the question—how do you appease a government bureaucrat? Eventually, he offered a certificate confirming the message was indeed gibberish, and that seemed to do the trick. Ready for takeoff.

When I visited Xu’s Brooklyn studio last fall, he told me he got the idea for Xu Bing Tianshu (2019–20) when a space company approached him to collaborate. He had already developed the characters for one of his previous works, Book from the Sky (ca. 1987–91), a set of scrolls containing 4,000 of them. When I asked him which company, he said he couldn’t tell me. It wasn’t hard to look up, though: it’s i-Space, a private Chinese company. I suspect he avoided naming them because the rocket didn’t make it through the atmosphere before it blew up. Xu and his team found the beat-up spacecraft the next day in the Gobi Desert, where it left a 90-foot-wide crater, then displayed it at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing. The resulting installation was a reflection on our species’ small role in a big world, one that inspires humility and awe in the face of a universe that we can barely comprehend. It’s a poignant piece, but a big hole and a broken rocket probably isn’t the publicity the company wanted.

Then there are size and material constraints: exorbitant costs, limits as to what can survive temperatures far below freezing, the whole zero-gravity thing. Rockets often drop off several satellites belonging to various parties in a kind of rideshare. The more weight and room they take up, the more expensive the lift. The New York–based artist-investigator Trevor Paglen came up with a clever solution for his 2018 project Orbital Reflector. He sent up a balloon in a satellite with a device that would inflate it when it went into orbit. Paglen chose lightweight, reflective Mylar that would reflect the sun, making the balloon visible from Earth at twilight and dawn. The artist wanted to highlight the best that the private space industry has to offer—exploration and innovation free from military or surveillance agendas—with a project that, like the best of space artworks, was meant to inspire wonder and awe. Sadly, during that year’s government shutdown, furloughed FCC workers weren’t able to grant the clearance necessary to inflate the balloon after it went up. The satellite was lost in space, along with the $1.5 million that it cost to produce.

Failure and humility are part and parcel of space exploration, though. That’s how Xin Liu, an artist and curator in MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative, put it when we spoke in February. Liu was amazed by all the resources offered at the Institute when she arrived as a graduate student in 2015—not every artist gets to share a water cooler with world-class scientists and engineers. Liu, who has a background in engineering and in performance, had long been interested in “experiments in measurements,” and was eager to scale up. But she confessed that it was only after her first zero-gravity flight that she began to ask an important question about sending art into space: why? Often, in STEM, the answer is, “to see if we can,” but that risks the consequences posed by nerds eager to see if they can split an atom who wind up inventing weapons of mass destruction.

In zero gravity, Liu found herself feeling sad and lonely. Something she had known her entire life—“the ground that had always held me”—was gone. She felt a similar sense of loss when she had her wisdom teeth removed: a part of her body was gone. And so, in 2019, she mourned by sending one tooth briefly into space. Soon, she began to wonder why many humans share such profound curiosity about the universe, and thought perhaps the impulse might be as natural as hunger or love.

Liu documented the launch of her wisdom tooth in a virtual reality video, Living Distance (2019), which will be on view this summer in her solo show at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. For another project, she launched potatoes into space for 30 days on a payload she designed herself; now, she’s planting them in the Pioneer Works garden. These are the basis of educational workshops that will culminate in feeding those potatoes to the children who sign up. When she told me this, I was flummoxed, and I followed up with that question she mentioned earlier: why? And she said, because she wanted to insist that space exploration shouldn’t just be a domain for eccentric billionaires. She hoped to bring it home for the next generation, so they might start to imagine their roles there.

DOES SOMETHING TAKE ON NEW MEANING when you send it into space? If it’s that easy, it would explain the odd symbolic gestures that litter recent history: humans have sent up dinosaur bones, a Nobel Prize replica, September 11 artifacts. In 2001 Pizza Hut even made a delivery to the International Space Station on a resupply rocket. But for Xu Bing a work doesn’t count as true “space art” when you just launch objects made for Earth into space. (For instance, Amoako Boafo’s 2021 project “Suborbital Triptych,” for which the Ghanaian artist sent up three paintings via Jeff Bezos’s private rocket company, Blue Origin.) But Tavares Strachan’s Enoch—which hitched a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 with Paglen’s balloon in 2018—is a good example of work that engages meaningfully with the conditions of outer space. Strachan’s work comprised a 24-karat gold urn containing a bust of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American astronaut, who tragically died in a 1967 supersonic jet crash, before ever making it to space. The work is a monument to what could have been, a way of helping Lawrence realize his dream posthumously.

This summer, Xu is planning to launch the world’s first satellite designed strictly for art’s sake. He knows it’s the first because there are about 6,000 satellites floating around right now, and each is categorized by its primary function. Xu hopes to collaborate with museums and invite artists for “residencies.” This is welcome news: the most thoughtful of the space artists is now leading the next wave. Xu’s satellite is less a tool for sending up objects than a conduit for using space as a medium. If all goes as planned, it will have screens to play videos, and cameras to take photos. The satellite should also be able to collect data from neighboring satellites, and transmit Morse code. Xu told me he wanted to start the residency because he hoped that encouraging free exploration from other artists might help expand his own imagination when it comes to this vast newly accessible territory.

It’s surprising that so much space art is so dull, given that outer space, like most good art, inherently asks all these existential questions about where we come from and what it means to be human. It’s why Bill Clinton had a lunar rock in his oval office—he’d point to it when debates got heated, and it would calm people down by making whatever problem seem smaller. If a rock can have that effect, you’d think it’d be almost too easy to make good space art.

The problem seems to be that, for a few powerful men, space elicits not humility, but a desire to conquer. Today, artists have a unique opportunity—and even responsibility—to shape our perception of, and role in, our extraterrestrial future. What could possibly go wrong?!  

For the last three New York seasons, and particularly during the past winter, women artists have begun to protest discrimination against their sex in the art world. Active protest began in 1969 with WAR, burgeoned in 1970 with the Ad Hoc Women’s Committee, which first addressed itself solely and successfully to raising the number of women in the Whitney Annual; now there are at least two other organizations in New York as well as smaller artists’ consciousness-raising groups. On the West Coast, at Cal Arts, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro have set up the first women’s art program, and Marcia Tucker will direct one similar course at the School of Visual Arts in New York. An international liaison network called WEB (West-East Bag) was recently created to inform women’s art groups of each other’s activities. In June, the new Los Angeles Council of Women Artists threatened a civil-rights suit against the Los Angeles County Mu­seum with statistics that reflect the na­tional situation: 29 of 713 artists whose works appeared in museum group shows in a decade were women; of 53 one­ artist shows, one was by a woman­ the same record, incidentally, as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and both of these women were photog­raphers.

Yet, in spite of all this activity, the art world has been slow in coming to grips with the question of sexist dis­ crimination. Real change probably won’t come about until the society we live in and its basic woman-man rela­tionships are fundamentally altered. In the meantime, however, discrimina­tion against women in the art world consists of: 1) disregarding women and stripping them of their self-confidence from art school on; 2) refusing to con­sider a married woman or mother a serious artist no matter how hard she works or what she produces; 3) label­ing women unfeminine and abnor­mally assertive if they persist in main­taining the value of their art and protest their treatment; 4) treating women artists as sex objects and using this as an excuse not to visit their studios or show their work (“Sure, her work looked terrific, but she’s such a good­ looking chick if I went to her studio I wouldn’t know if I liked the work or her,” one male dealer told me earnestly “so I never went”); 5) using fear of social or professional rejection to turn successful women against unsuccessful women, and vice versa; 6) ripping off women if they participate in the un­fortunately influential social life of the art world (if she comes to the bar with a man she’s a sexual appendage and is ignored as such; if she comes with a woman she’s gay; if she comes alone she’s on the make); 7) identify­ing women artists with their men (“That’s so-and-so’ s wife; I think she paints too”); 8) exploiting women’s inherent sensitivity and upbringing as nonviolent creatures by resorting to personal insults, shouting down, art­ world clout, in order to avoid con­frontation or to subdue and discourage women who may be more articulate and intelligent, or better artists than their male company; 9) galleries turning an artist away without looking at her slides, saying, “Sorry, we already have a woman,” or refusing to have any women in their stable because women are “too difficult” (a direct quote–though since the Movement, people are more careful about saying these things). And so forth.

The roots of this discrimination can probably be traced to the fact that making art is considered a primary function, like running a business or a government, and women are conven­tionally relegated to the secondary, housekeeping activities such as writing about, exhibiting or caring for the art made by men. Art-making in America has a particularly virile tradition, the ideal of large scale, “tough,” un­compromising work being implicitly a masculine prerogative. Men are some­how “professional” artists even if they must teach a twenty-hour week or work forty hours as carpenter, museum guard or designer. Women, on the other hand, especially if they are married and have children, are supposed to be wholly consumed by menial labors. If a single female artist supports her­ self by teaching or working as a “gallery girl” or whatever, she is called a dilettante. If she is a mother, she may work forty hours a week in her studio and she will be taken seriously by other artists only after she has become so thoroughly para­noid about her position that she can be called an “aggressive bitch,” an opportunist, “pushy” and so on. It doesn’t seem to occur to people that women who can manage all this and still be serious artists may be more serious than their male counterparts. Sadly enough, most of the few women who have made it into the public eye have been so absorbed by the male world that they resist association with other less successful women artists, for fear of being forced into a “woman’s ghetto” and having their work thereby taken less seriously. They tend to think of them selves as one of an ex­traordinary elite who are strong enough and good enough to make it, not real­izing that they denigrate and isolate their own work by being ashamed of their own sex, that if their art is good it cannot be changed by pride in being a woman.

The worst source not only of dis­crimination but of the tragic feelings of inferiority so common among women artists is the art schools and college art departments (especially women’s colleges), most of which have little or no female faculty despite a plethora of unknown male names. Women com­prise a majority of art students, at least for the early years; after that they begin to drop out as a result of having no women teachers after whom to model themselves, seeing few women shown in museums and galleries, lack of en­couragement from male professors who tell them that they’ ll just get married anyway, that the only women artists who make it are dykes, that they’ll get along fine if they screw the instructor, or that pale colors, weak design and fine line are “feminine” (i.e . bad) but less so when perpetrated by men. Small wonder that there are far fewer women in the graduate schools, that survivors of this system are afraid to take their slides to galleries or in­vite criticism, that they find it difficult to work in isolation if their husbands move them to the sticks, that they may marry an artist instead of con­tinuing to be one, or become the de­spised “lady painter” in between children, without studio space or materials money.

When a woman does show, the same attitudes prevail in regard to journalistic coverage. The one art magazine that has had any feature coverage of the “woman problem” (two articles, which enabled the editors to announce their “women’s issue”) now feels it need never mention the subject again. The Whitney Annual was chosen for sustained public pro­test last year because survey shows are the most obvious examples of discrimination, focused as they are on no single taste, but simply on “what is being done in such and such an area.” But why is it that so few women’s studios are visited when survey shows are being organized? Connections in the art world are made through friends and galleries, and aside from the prob­lem of competition with men (which makes it unlikely that many women will be recommended to begin with) few women artists are represented by the big galleries to which curators refer when doing a show.

What applies to group shows ap­plies equally to foundation grants, which again purport to concentrate on no single style, gallery affiliation , or institutional support. The statistics here are even worse. The usual defense is that not many women applied or that they weren’t “good enough.” It is important to remember that so-called “quality” on a list of, say, twenty­ five younger artists given grants or shown in a museum, will not be agreed upon by any five “experts.” If “quality” is admittedly elusive, why is it that foundations ignore women with qualifications (one-artist shows, prestigious group exhibitions , special­ized press coverage, even age and length of career) far exceeding those of male colleagues who do receive grants? A Women’s Art Registry (138 Prince St., N.Y.C. , 10012) , now in­cluding slides of about a thousand women, makes it clear that a large number of female artists are working on a par with men . Last spring it was possible to put together, in good conscience, an exhibition of twenty-six women who had never had one-artist shows. I could never have organized an exhibition of that strength (all this being regulated by my own taste, of course) of unshown male artists; by the time they are that mature, most men have had a show somewhere . All grant lists, all art school faculties and all group shows include a certain percentage that is totally inexplicable to anybody. Why aren’t these, at least, replaced with women whose work is as good as the best men accepted? The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Na­tional Endowment for the Arts, among others, have lousy records. In fact , there isn’t any art-world institution so far that hasn’t.

Warhol’s process in creating these prints mirrored that of the official Chinese artists who have painted fresh, identical portraits of Mao annually since 1950. Displayed prominently above the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square, the 20-by-15-foot likeness of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman, based on an easel-painting original by Zhang Zhenshi, reflects the cultural split of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from its imperial past. This work gave Warhol renewed appreciation for Zhang’s source, the photographic image the American artist first adapted from his copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (commonly known as the Little Red Book). But his curiosity about communism never compared to his love for American capitalism. As dissident artist Ai Weiwei wrote in his introduction to Makos’s book, Warhol insisted that “a place without McDonalds could never be good—no matter what else it had.”

In the fifty years since Warhol produced his colorful silkscreen series, few historians have reconsidered its meaning in the context of evolving US-China tensions. Did Warhol originally show admiration or project skepticism? How do we make sense of the commodification of Mao’s image just a few years before China liberalized its economy? And does “artistic freedom” have limitations when it interferes in the public discourse of foreign nations? The Warhol Museum agreed to withhold Mao prints from mainland China venues of its 2013–14 traveling show “Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal.” But in the United States, such images are unrestricted. The Whitney Museum in New York, for example, prominently displayed a “giant Mao” painting in its 2018 Warhol retrospective, which also included several 1976 “Hammer and Sickle” still-life prints—wherein, in a satiric twist, the tools bear the branding of an American manufacturer, Champion.

Andy Warhol’s Mao silkscreens, 1972, on view in an exhibition in Apolda, German, in 2018.

To understand Warhol’s approach, we must begin with his initial infatuation with Chairman Mao, which stemmed not from support but amusement. “I have been reading so much about China,” he wrote in a diary entry from 1971. “They’re so nutty. They don’t believe in creativity. The only picture they ever have is of Mao Zedong.” Here, Warhol referred to the CCP’s mass propaganda campaign during the Cultural Revolution, which presented Mao as the embodiment of China’s highest post-revolutionary ideals. This far-reaching initiative saturated the Chinese media sphere—according to the Peking Review, revolutionary workers printed more than 840 million portraits just from July 1966 to May 1967—and made news beyond, giving inspiration to the Black Panthers as well as anti-imperialist movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon, Beijing, Feb. 21, 1972.

On top of this, diplomatic relations between China and the US were becoming possible for the first time since the Chinese Revolution of 1949. With the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, the PRC and the Soviet Union were at odds outside their mutual support for North Vietnam. When China invited the US Table Tennis team to Beijing in 1971, President Richard Nixon saw an opportunity. “Ping-pong diplomacy,” as it was called, led to Nixon’s own visit to Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai a year later, resulting in a mass media spectacle in the US that proliferated Mao’s image across television and print outlets. When Life magazine named Chairman Mao the most famous person in the world, Warhol knew he had found his newest subject.

The portfolio thus began as a reaction to Mao’s cult of celebrity before the PRC had fully solidified official connections with the West. The Chinese leader’s widespread fame, paired with the aphorisms found in the Little Red Book, naturally appealed to Warhol’s Pop sensibilities. (The artist himself even tried professional modeling, as documented in Makos’s new book, Andy Modeling Portfolio Makos.) At the behest of his dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who originally suggested he paint Albert Einstein, Warhol developed an initial run of ten screen prints that glamorized the portrait with wide brushstrokes of acrylic paint. Warhol in effect patted Mao’s cheeks with rouge, dabbed his lips a deeper shade of red, and accentuated the mole on his chin to make it appear as a beauty mark—thereby rendering his image effeminate.

Liu Wei, A Good Father with Mao Poster, ND, watercolor on paper, 12 4/10 by 9 4/10 inches.

Through such aesthetic subversion, these works served in part to lampoon Chinese culture and politics for Western audiences. Departing from the mechanical precision of Warhol’s “Marilyn” and “Liz” series, the Mao portraits are more expressionist in nature, despite the strict realism of the original picture, and they produce a psychedelic effect when shown together. Some feature dark purple paint over pastel blue; others combine lime green with fiery orange. A few remain faithful to CCP aesthetics, placing the Great Helmsman in red-and-yellow color schemes reminiscent of the Chinese flag. Warhol could print photographic portraits onto canvases in rapid succession, adding new distortions to each through the silkscreening process. Over the course of two years, he produced 199 Mao paintings in various shades and sizes, and ten screen prints in editions of 250.

If Warhol’s artistic practice was in service of commodifying culture, the Mao works have served much larger ideological purposes here in the US. For decades, Western artists, writers, and curators have taken a dim view of politics and daily life in the PRC, based largely on Cold War biases. With the Trump and Biden administrations ramping up tensions with China again today, it’s easy to see how Warhol’s prints continue, however inadvertently, to reflect American bluster and insecurity.

One of Andy Warhol’s Mao paintings, 1972, sold for $47.5 million at Sotheby’s, New York, November 2015.

Two of Mao’s most widely studied essays, “On Practice” and “On Contradiction” (both 1937), brought the Chinese Revolution into wider philosophical discussions, forming the basis of Maoism, both in China and abroad. “If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself,” he argues. “All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.” Contrasting himself to academics and dogmatists, Mao positions “contradiction” as a living component of human history. This is why Chinese Communism opposes the Western metaphysical notion that human nature has been innately the same since the dawn of civilization. “In the process of development of each thing,” Mao contends, “a movement of opposites exists from beginning to end.”

Unlike here in the US, the term “propaganda” did not carry a negative connotation in China. Rather, political and artistic education formed the basis of the CCP’s cultural strategy since before the founding of modern China. In 1942, as Mao solidified his leadership role in the Revolution, he gave two talks in Yan’an articulating the political role of art and arguing that military action should be paired with a cultural strategy: “Our writers and artists have their literary and art work to do, but their primary task is to understand people and know them well.” Such understanding leads, in turn, to seeing art as a form of motivational teaching. From the Yan’an period until the mid-1970s, Mao and his wife Jiang Qing developed new cultural institutions for peasants that promoted social programs focused on painting, ballet, opera, and symphony, all modeled after those in the Soviet Union.

Andy Warhol’s paiting Mao, 1973, on view at the Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, German, 2007.

With all this in mind, Warhol’s depiction of Mao as a sort of cult figure chimes with Western ambivalence regarding both politicians and advertising—a relationship that the painter, a former adman turned “business artist,” exploited cleverly. The Little Red Book disseminated Mao’s ideas; Warhol propagated his image. The synthesis of mass marketing, political status, and stardom reflected US pop culture in the 1960s and ’70s, when brands like Coca-Cola were touted as symbols of personal freedom and an actor named Ronald Reagan became governor of California. Still, it would be irresponsible to place a half century of Cold War prejudice on one artist. In reality, Warhol’s work resonated so much because the PRC, having been closed to foreigners for decades, existed largely outside global observation. The Mao portfolio invited critiques of—or at least Warholian irony toward—Mao and his country from Euro-American audiences with little to no Chinese experience.

Mainstream American media has routinely portrayed Mao as an extremely wily, charismatic, and sometimes monstrous world leader. Within China, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, famously orchestrated a CCP resolution stating that Mao’s leadership was “70 percent right” and “30 percent wrong,” specifically referencing the fatal consequences of the Great Leap Forward. Half a century later, Warhol’s prints and paintings seem to have indirectly anticipated China’s integration into the global economy after Mao’s death in 1976, heightening the irony of the artworks’ international market value. The pieces continue to break records at auction, with paintings from the series fetching $17.4 million at Christie’s in 2006, $47.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2015, and $32.4 million there in 2017. Meanwhile, American artists like Brian Donnelly (aka KAWS) have sparked controversy for buffoonish depictions of Mao. It is difficult to imagine this happening without Warhol, to whom the work is an oblique homage.

Mao’s portrait splattered with paint during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing, Mar. 23, 1989.

The image of Mao remains ubiquitous among contemporary Chinese artists, who have pushed Warhol’s practice into a feedback loop. After Mao’s death, CCP propaganda artists began critiquing him openly in public spaces. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the Stars Art Group revolted against the prevailing Socialist Realist aesthetic by holding public exhibitions that promoted creative freedom. At the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, dissident artists Yu Dongyue, Yu Zhijian, and Lu Decheng spattered the official portrait of Mao with ink—perhaps taking a page out of Warhol’s book. And from the late ’80s to the present, conceptual artists like Wang Guangyi, Liu Wei, and Li Shan have continued to draw influence from Warhol, as filtered through Political Pop, Cynical Realism, and other styles that developed in China following Mao’s death.

Li Shan, Mao, 1995, acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 22 1/2 by 13 3/8 inches.

Warhol’s ambiguous late-life response to Chinese Communism (the artist died just five years after visiting Beijing) should serve as a reminder of how direct experience can alter opinion, even while anticommunism remains deeply ingrained in American culture. Consider coverage of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, with sitting members of Congress perpetuating Cold War talking points that conflate the CCP with the Nazis, and major newspapers making comparisons to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Further, the charge that China’s zero-Covid lockdown measures are “dystopian” shows how the West reacts to any perceived threat to its cultural hegemony, while pandemic deaths in the US now exceed one million.

After fifty years, Warhol’s conflicting intentions for the Mao portfolio pale in comparison to what it symbolizes for the art world today—the stringent relationship between art and capital. Despite his love for money, the artist was nonetheless drawn to Mao’s words and kept a copy of the Little Red Book on hand. He also appreciated the official art he encountered in the PRC. As Makos noted, “Andy actually thought the real Mao portrait was better than his, and really loved the original.” In one of Makos’s photos from Beijing, Warhol stands at the gates of the Forbidden City in front of a Mao portrait painted by one of Zhang’s successors, Ge Xiaoguang. The Pop art superstar appears to be an offbeat individualist as Chinese pedestrians pass by, in uniform garb, seemingly unfazed.

Sadly, that scenario is now playing out in Poland. Since the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) took power in November 2015, the limits of parliamentary democracy with a tripartite division of powers have been tested in many areas of society. In the field of arts and culture, a series of new appointments as directors of the country’s most prominent museums has been progressing with alarming speed over the last three years, indicating an impending implosion of public art institutions. The most recent: Janusz Janowski’s nomination to serve as director of Zachęta National Gallery of Art, replacing Hanna Wróblewska, the institution’s director since 2010.

There have been few worse pairings in the history of cultural matchmaking. Janowski is a no-name figure from Gdansk: an artist and musician with little managerial experience who has climbed the ranks of the Association of Polish Artists (ZPAP) to be lifted, under the current government, from his local context and given a platform in the rightist media, where he tends to share his traditionalist views on art and proclaim the righteousness of the official party line in the ongoing culture wars. Zachęta is a major art collecting institution that cares for more than 3,500 artworks, employs some sixty people (plus contractors), oversees three buildings (including the Polish Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale in Venice), and organizes about thirty exhibitions annually, each with robust educational programming, which receive twenty- to forty-thousand visitors each, at a conservative estimate. Founded in 1860 as the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts—zachęta literally means “encouragement”—it makes sense that, in addition to acquiring and exhibiting, Zachęta has been actively producing cutting-edge projects by both Polish and international artists. Commissions for the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale have included new works by Krzysztof Wodiczko (2009), Yael Bartana (2011), and Sharon Lockhart (2017), to name just a few.

Janusz Janowski (left) at the opening of his retrospective at the State Gallery of Art in Sopot, Poland, 2016.

The selection of Janowski to run Zachęta is therefore an affront to the Polish art scene. He is a truly terrible painter, but bad artists can still, theoretically, be successful administrators. However, he has never run an institution of this scale, and he demonstrates no expertise in contemporary art, which is critical to be able to serve Zachęta’s mission and maintain its active program of acquiring work and producing new projects. Case in point: When interviewed in 2018 about the history and current workings of ZPAP by Szum, Poland’s leading contemporary art magazine, Janowski admitted that he had never before heard of the periodical. In his public appearances, Janowski states his respect for the historical great masters (whose iconography and style he attempts to follow in his own practice but fails miserably) and adherence to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The latter point tends to be crucial to European nationalists: an affirmation of Catholicism at best, and, at worst, a semi-veiled shorthand for Islamophobia, xenophobia, and racism. In the art context, this emphasis on religious tradition serves as an effective double weapon against the criticality of contemporary art: it effaces both new formats and modern-day topics that may be deemed “profane.”

View of the exhibition “Strike,” featuring work by Käthe Kollwitz, Hito Steyerl, and Keren Donde, at Zachęta in 2019.

If Janowski takes over Zachęta National Gallery of Art on January 1 as expected, it will be the end of an era. In the three decades since the political transformation of 1989, the gallery has had four incredible woman directors: Barbara Majewska (1990–93), who transitioned the institution out of the Communist-era system; Anda Rottenberg (1993–2001), whose unwavering support for critical and potentially controversial art made her the Polish archetype of a contemporary curator; Agnieszka Morawińska (2001–10), an art historian and professional diplomat who solidified the Gallery’s standing on the international scene; and Hanna Wróblewska, under whom Zachęta became a model of openness, inclusivity, and accessibility. Regularly visited by families, seniors, and those with disabilities, Zachęta has been a much-loved powerhouse of cultural production, whose impact extends far beyond professional art circles.

Theoretically, things may still change: the nomination is not yet an appointment. There was an outburst of support for Hanna Wróblewska in July 2021, when it was announced that her contract, set to expire at the end of the year, would not be renewed; and various professional bodies from which the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage requested opinions, such as the Polish chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), gave Janowski negative assessments. (According to Polish law, their opinion is non-binding.) An online petition from Zachęta’s audience has garnered more than four thousand signatures. Artists and cultural workers are now consolidating and voicing their objections through a number of actions, both in public and online. On December 16, Zachęta’s employees and friends gathered around the 1900 neoclassical edifice to hold it in a collective embrace.

Still, the Culture Minister, Piotr Gliński, like the rest of the current government, has blatantly ignored similar outcries in the past. Janowski’s nomination comes on the heels of earlier changes in directorial positions establishing a pattern in which experts are replaced by individuals loyal to the ruling party. It is also telling that, in four recent ministerial appointments—the Warsaw National Museum (directed by Agnieszka Morawińska until mid-2018), Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (directed by Małgorzata Ludwisiak until late 2019), the Polish Sculpture Center in Orońsko (directed by Eulalia Domanowska until late 2019), and now, the National Gallery—men replaced women. In early December, information leaked to the press that the contract of Jarosław Suchan, the director of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź—one of the first public collections of avant-garde art in the world—had not been renewed; he is now the interim director of the museum he has led since 2006, and a new director is to be appointed within twelve months. It has become clear that we are dealing with an ideological takeover of public museums aimed at subordinating their programs to the government’s official cultural politics.

The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland.

In Poland, the Minister of Culture and National Heritage appoints directors of state-funded cultural institutions after consultation with professional organizations. In that sense, there is nothing unlawful about all these recent nominations. But that doesn’t make them right. For years now, members of Poland’s cultural circles have been lobbying for open competitions that would allow the most qualified and visionary candidate for a given position to emerge through a transparent process. Previous culture ministers have sometimes accepted the idea; the current Minister, Law and Justice’s Gliński, has not. In the most striking case, he rejected the results of such a competition: after the end of Dariusz Stola’s first five-year term as director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in 2019, a fifteen-person committee chose to reappoint him, but Gliński, who initially agreed to the competition, refused to sign off. The divergence was grounded in Stola’s program for the museum, reflecting historical relations between Polish Jews and non-Jewish Poles, which PiS would prefer to present in a more exculpatory light. After almost a yearlong stalemate, the minister appointed POLIN’s previous deputy director, Zygmunt Stępiński, to run the museum. In a similar move a few years earlier, Gliński refused to appoint his own predecessor, Małgorzata Omilanowska, to direct the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

The nomination of Janowski as director of Zachęta reflects two possible rationales. Either the Ministry of Culture is running out of party loyalists who might be at least semi-competent candidates for Poland’s art institutions—after all, expertise in contemporary art and support for fascism rarely go hand in hand—or it seeks simultaneously to control and punish the contemporary art circles that the ruling, extreme-right authorities consider the nest of the “rotten left.” While much can be said about Janowski’s incompetence, his record of party-line adherence is impeccable. As an example, he has publicly voiced contempt for the “LGBT ideology”—shorthand for any position on gender and sexuality differing from that dictated by Catholic morality, widely used by the right in Poland’s ongoing culture wars—and demonstrated his eagerness by stating that the party’s promised changes in the field of culture “do not proceed fast enough.”

Most alarmingly, this is a sign of a new turn in Poland’s post-1989 cultural politics. Is this going to be a return to the Communist-era system, where Zachęta was the official exhibition hall of the Association of Polish Artists, ZPAP? In the People’s Republic of Poland, Zachęta—then called the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions (CBWA)—was the head institution in a centralized network of local galleries situated in smaller cities, all managed by ZPAP, which was, in turn, the only professional artist organization. ZPAP was responsible for everything from administering art supplies to distributing official state commissions. This system attracted and supported mediocrity: every member was eligible for an occasional solo exhibition, regardless of the quality of their work. Detaching CBWA Zachęta from that network in 1989 and releasing the local Bureaus of Art Exhibitions to the city authorities was a major part of Poland’s post-Communist transformation in the field of culture. Reconnecting those two bodies by appointing ZPAP’s president to run Zachęta can only result in a terrible cost to the quality of programming.

Today, some local chapters of ZPAP still have their galleries—most of Janowski’s curatorial experience comes from the one in Gdańsk—but the Association has been steadily losing significance and reputation, degrading to an empty shell of an institution with a few entrenched conservatives keeping their positions. Though its official membership numbers in the range of 5,000, ZPAP has only about 300 active members, according to a recent report by the magazine NN6T. Very few new graduates join. It is precisely the kind of marginal group harboring resentment against the so-called cultural elites whom the current ruling party is mobilizing in order to enforce their new Polish order. In the absence of an alternative professional organization, ZPAP still operates as a professional consulting body, which already gives these few hundred people a disproportionate influence over the country’s art institutions. The association has been the perfect addressee for the government’s political motto—the “good change”—that promises to lift the self-proclaimed “marginalized” to new positions of power.

The future of Zachęta under Janowski can be deduced from recent precedents. The directorship could become a spectacle of incompetence and chaos, as happened with the National Museum in Warsaw (MNW): Jerzy Miziołek was appointed museum director in November 2018, after the well-respected Agnieszka Morawińska resigned, citing communication problems with the Ministry. Miziołek, a professor of archaeology with minimal managerial experience, caused a public outrage after censoring works by Natalia LL and Katarzyna Kozyra in the permanent exhibition (they “distracted the youth”) and subsequently closing down the whole gallery of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Miziołek further faced protests from his own staff after he fired several established curators and installed an exhibition that included digital prints of works by Leonardo da Vinci. He lasted a year.

In an alternative scenario, Janowski’s tenure could dissolve into right-wing extremism grounded in hate speech, racism, antisemitism, sexism, and homophobia, as is now occurring at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, where the current director—appointed in January 2020 without a competition—has run such program. The last two years at Ujazdowski included a seminar/book launch warning against “gender ideology,” a display of offensive works by an artist previously found guilty of inciting racism in his native Sweden, and a blackface performance mocking the death of George Floyd—a full nationalist playbook, all executed in the name of fighting “political correctness” and pursuing the “freedom of art.” (I will not dignify the actions of this director by mentioning either his or the artists’ names, specifically because these shameful events are calculated for publicity.)

There is also a third possibility—sadly, the most likely of the three: the gradual slide of Zachęta National Gallery of Art into the margins of Polish cultural life with irrelevant shows, substandard acquisitions, declining research projects, and ideologized educational programs; a Zachęta that slowly loses its hard-won respect on the international scene, and loses touch with contemporary artists—the Gallery’s current lifeblood—as well as its public. We must not let this happen.

Magdalena Moskalewicz is a Warsaw-born art historian, curator, and editor specializing in art from the former Eastern Europe, and Assistant Professor, Adj. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Zachęta Director Hanna Wróblewska commissioned her to curate the Polish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, in 2015, and Moskalewicz guest curated the 2016 exhibition “The Travellers: Voyage and Migration in New Art from Central and Eastern Europe” at Zachęta.

All in all, the struggles of the pandemic revealed the fundamentally cathartic value of making things. Arts and crafts experienced a surge in popularity over the last year and a half. Publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Smithsonian magazine have chronicled the boom in hands-on hobbies like sewing, crochet, and flower pressing.

Between Life and Death, a drawing made by a cancer patient, pastel, 10 by 8 inches

Experts aren’t surprised that people intuitively gravitated toward creative expression during a period of extreme uncertainty. At one end of the spectrum, drawing, crafting, and sculpting on one’s own have therapeutic benefits in general. Many studies have documented a positive physiological response to both aesthetic and tactile experiences, whether walking down the halls of a hospital painted in bright colors or working with clay in a ceramics class. In one instance, a 2017 Drexel University experiment measured blood flow in various areas of participants’ brains while they completed a series of simple art-making tasks. Among the findings were that doodling or coloring in a mandala activated parts of the brain related to pleasurable activities and a sense of reward. Of course, people are drawn to make art for subjective reasons, says Juliet King, who holds dual appointments as an associate professor of art therapy at George Washington University and an adjunct associate professor of neurology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, where she cofounded a program for art therapy in neuroscience and medicine. “When we create, we have a symbol,” she notes. “We have an objective way of saying we are here.” Dina Schapiro, assistant chairperson of Pratt Institute’s Creative Arts Therapy department similarly reflects on the therapeutic benefits of simply making art: “It gives us peace and calm. It creates rhythm. It separates time and space. That’s all really important.”

[[Coloring During Quarantine: RxArt’s Artist-Designed Coloring Books]]

At the other end of the spectrum is working with an art therapist in a clinical practice. Trained as psychotherapists, King explained, practitioners use the creative process and symbolic communication to facilitate treatment. Guided by specialized clinicians, patients work in artistic mediums to express their thoughts and tap into regions of the psyche that are often not consciously accessible.

A participant in an EEG study investigating brain wave activity in response to art making vs. rote motor movement, 2017, at the Indiana University Neuroscience Center

The clinical practice of art therapy is far from new, its inauguration dating to the 1940s and generally attributed to the American psychologist Margaret Naumburg, also known for founding the first Montessori school in the United States. Working at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Naumburg asked patients to draw with paint or chalk pastels on large sheets of paper, then prompted them to talk about their artwork and its symbolic imagery. Since then, research has shown that art therapy can be beneficial in an array of contexts. Over the years, the therapeutic approach has been used in prisons to address mental health issues and as a tool of rehabilitation. Art therapy programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District and among refugees from Burma in North Carolina have helped traumatized children and adolescents who are unable to verbalize their feelings.

Treatment protocols are flexible and patient-dependent: two art therapists may choose different artistic mediums to treat the same mental health condition. The core principle, however, is always based on a therapeutic response to those materials, the theory being that particular mediums evoke particular types of emotional expression. Although this aspect of art therapy is not yet scientifically proven, King said, the hypothesis is that mediums such as watercolors tend to elicit a primarily sensorimotor or feeling-based response, whereas colored pencils or collage generally provoke a strong cognitive or thinking-based reaction. Pastel chalks are messy and break easily, which can create anxiety for those who need greater control in their life. On the other hand, cutting and arranging magazine images can provide structure and precision for clients who need such support. “Clinicians are warned against using art therapy techniques without having the training to understand how the materials and interventions work together,” King cautioned. “If someone were to work with a client [who] ‘opened up’ through a watercolor, it might become dangerous for the client, who might become overwhelmed and flooded in the process.” While patients need never have taken an art class, clinicians are required to complete basic coursework in drawing, painting, and sculpture. “Formal art training is necessary for art therapists to learn how to manipulate media, and understand composition and technique,” Deborah Elkis-Abuhoff, associate professor and director of Hofstra University’s Creative Arts Therapy Counseling program, wrote in an email. “This helps the art therapist to have a baseline of understanding when working with a client.”

Art therapy researchers describe multiple paths for addressing emotional challenges. One 1990 study by art therapists Kathryn Cox and Karen Price outlines how fast-drying tempera paint on paper helped treat adolescent clients with substance addictions. The researchers designed a program where patients met as a group twice per week for 45-minute sessions in which they were asked to draw an incident that occurred during the time they were drinking or abusing drugs. The therapists selected tempera paint specifically because it is more difficult to use than pencils or markers, paralleling the unmanageability of addiction. The art experience was meant to reflect the core concept of unmanageability from the first of the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve steps to recovery. In a 1995 paper, art therapist Holly Feen-Calligan described a different approach to working with clients in an addiction recovery program, asking them instead to draw with their eyes shut or with their nondominant hand. Here, the goal was to abandon a preconceived idea of how things should look and allow expressive images to spring forth from a less structured inner place.

A mask made by an army flight medic during an art therapy session at NICoE at Walter Reed

Art therapy has proven particularly successful for clients suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. For nearly two decades, US military personnel have been mobilized to fight a global war on terror, exposing millions of combat soldiers to physical and psychological danger, often resulting in either traumatic brain injury or PTSD. In a 2015 TED talk, art therapist Melissa Walker of the National Intrepid Center of Excellence at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center described how crafting papier-mâché masks allows service members to express emotional war injuries through a harrowing avatar. At their initial session, service members receive a blank papier-mâché mask to decorate for two hours, and are told thereby to explore part of themselves or their emotional trauma; she finds veterans often return to work more on their masks in their spare time. “Mask making is a useful way to explore identity, as it allows for an objective and distanced approach to expressing and eventually discussing self,” King said. The success of the approach stems from a purposeful mix of subject matter—buried feelings of alienation, grief, loss—and material selection. “Working with papier-mâché in this capacity is about allowing materials to transform over time,” Schapiro, who specializes in clients with eating disorders, explained. “You have a dry and flaky material that gets wet and heavy, and then with some time, dries and then hardens. It’s a metamorphosis of materials that requires our egos to tolerate change and be patient.” Papier-mâché is also forgiving, she adds: it can always be repaired, even once dry, and it’s simple to clean up, “which can often create ease when dealing with uncomfortable feelings that arise.”

In this field, making art is a broad concept that doesn’t require a cache of professional art supplies, formal art training, or a sophisticated sense of composition. In fact, art therapists sometimes use an expressive exercise called the “scribble chase,” in which client and therapist use different watercolor markers and a large sheet of paper; as the therapist begins drawing a line, the client
is encouraged to “chase” it with their marker. Once the sheet is covered, the practitioner prompts the client to find images within the scribble and construct a story from the pictures or scene they see within the abstraction. Art therapists have also begun to embrace virtual reality, conducting sessions with headsets and remote controls to create 3D images in a virtual space. “Every art therapist has a slightly different way of working and introducing art media,” explains psychologist Cathy A. Malchiodi, founder and executive director of the Trauma-Informed Practices and Expressive Arts Therapy Institute. She often treats highly traumatized victims of assault and witnesses to violence. “Many people need to acquire a sort of visual language in the early stages of art therapy, as they may not have engaged in art-making since childhood,” Dr. Malchiodi said. “I might ask them to make a gesture or even try to make a sound like a sigh, and then use colors, shapes, and lines to show me what that looks like. Over time, most people start to become comfortable with media, just like learning a new language.”

Lately, many people have learned the therapeutic value of art-making at home on their own. As the world emerges from a long, dark pause and emotional needs rapidly adapt, drawing, sewing, and collaging at the kitchen table may continue to help individuals process and punctuate their daily reality. When asked if people will find making art so therapeutic once daily life recalibrates, Schapiro answered, “what I know in my heart is that we’re never going to be the same. There’s no way of going back, because we can’t. It’s going to have to be different. Now what we want to do with that difference depends on how much healing we experienced and how much awareness we gained from the experience of coping creatively with ourselves and the people we love.”

This article appears in the September/October 2021 issue, pp. 34–36.

Long before NFTs, many artists used alternative financial instruments and legal documents to assert control over their market, for both practical and artistic reasons. Yves Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1962) is a key example. Klein sold empty space which he priced according to the physical displacement of air by ingots of pure gold—the only form of payment he accepted for the work. Klein intended the piece to become nonexistent; it was represented by receipts, which buyers were instructed to burn. Half the gold paid to the artist would be deposited in the Seine as part of the transfer. Ultimately, the only evidence of the artwork’s existence would be a note in a ledger. Lawrence Weiner’s wall works consist of replaceable stencils, removable installations, and irrevocable certificates of authentication. Christo and Jeanne-Claude sold derivative works to raise funds for monumental temporary public projects, transferring the financial value of their art to multiples that give buyers a sense of ownership.

Mitchell F Chan, IKB Cachet de Garantie, 2021, digital image.

Mitchell Chan’s Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (2017) is a series of “empty digital spaces imbued with an immaterial artistic sensibility” that he sold as ERC-20 compliant tokens using an earlier iteration of the Ethereum blockchain (ERC-721 is the current standard). The project engages Klein’s inquiry into immateriality to highlight the system that creates value for cryptocurrency, which determines scarcity through the limits of algorithms rather than the finite amounts of metal in mines. Chan offers the ineffable: uncolored digital frames that he characterizes as having “a pure blankness” but with the energetic reference of the color blue, which he associates with International Klein Blue (IKB), the color of the cover of the receipt books Klein used to record the sales of his zones. IKB remains under copyright to the artist’s estate, so Chan developed his own shade to stand in. “To research a suitable blue sensibility for this project, I travelled to the north coast of Prince Edward Island, and created studies of different shades of blue present on the horizon where the Atlantic Ocean and sky converge,” he wrote in an accompanying statement, titled “The Blue Paper.” Tinted with Chan’s new signature shade, it is a riff on the white papers that introduce new types of blockchain assets.

Each of Chan’s “IKB tokens” is worth a specific amount of Ethereum currency, with series 0 priced at 0.1 ETH and prices of subsequent series increasing exponentially (series 7 is priced at 12.8 ETH). Sales are documented using a smart contract that allows for purchasers to remain anonymous, limits the number of tokens sold to 101, and tracks the provenance of each NFT through subsequent resales. There was little interest in Chan’s project when it first appeared four years ago, but it sold out at the onset of the NFT craze in February 2021. On April 27, he released a new series, using an existing contract architecture for the work that predates the platforms like OpenSea and Nifty Gateway that artists and collectors now use to distribute and access works on the Ethereum blockchain.

Andrea Bonaceto, Sophia the Robot, and Hanson Robotics: Sophia Instantiation, 2021, acrylic on digital print.

Processes of financialization have not only replaced art objects with legal agreements but also situated the artwork as both a speculative instrument with a monetary value that can be manipulated and a relatively safe place to hold assets, since art’s value rarely declines. Marcel Duchamp explored this apparent contradiction in his 1924 print edition Monte Carlo Bond. The mixed-media letterpress and photographic print bears a cutout of Duchamp’s face covered in soap suds with his hair sculpted into devil horns, photographed by Man Ray. This image is set in a roulette wheel, and a gambling table covers the ground. The right column bears hand stamps acknowledging the bond’s purchase and transfer. Eight numbered bonds that reflect legal obligation were issued, giving buyers shares in Duchamp’s “company.” The bonds, each worth 500 francs and payable in three years at 20 percent interest, were intended to finance Duchamp’s gambling, which he framed as experiments with chance. The bonds were worthless as financial instruments, as they came with the guarantee that Duchamp would lose all the investment capital at the roulette table, but they still possess theoretically limitless value as artworks. Bond #22 sold at a 2020 Sotheby’s auction in London for approximately $685,000, and Bond #30 fetched $2,405,000 at a 2015 Christie’s auction.

One of the more innovative uses of NFT is as a way of building micro-investment in creative projects that are difficult to fund in traditional ways. Recently, NFTs associated with artworks by the android Sophia, a creation of Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, were auctioned on Nifty Gateway. Sophia Instantiation fetched $688,888. Sophia’s creator, artist and roboticist David Hanson, and his team taught the android how to paint by introducing examples of historical and contemporary art into her neural networks, and programming her motor functions to operate a brush. Hanson also added Sophia’s own early painting attempts into the data set, to help her develop a distinct personal style. The process of conceiving works became iterative, too. “Sometimes the neural networks were generating images on the basis of words,” Hanson said in an interview, “so you put in the word that generates the image back into the neural network, along with Sophia’s own drawing.” He has exhibited Sophia and other androids at museums, but he finds the budgets offered by art institutions insufficient to support his research. With financing for experimental science also becoming scarce, Hanson is using NFT sales to raise capital.

Jerry Saltz and Kenny Schachter: The First 10,000, 2021, digital collage.

A significant obstacle to the ubiquity of NFTs is the questionable legality of cryptocurrency networks. Smart contracts may not be enforceable in court. Right now, whoever mints the NFT associated with an image asserts ownership of its digital rights, whether the minter has an actual copyright interest or not. An artist who thrives in the legally contentious space of appropriation, Richard Prince has minted NFTs of his “New Portraits” series (2014), for which he printed other people’s Instagram posts as his own work. Art critics Jerry Saltz and Kenny Schachter created a Beeple-style composite image from Saltz’s social media feeds, which included their own version of a contested Prince image of the singer Kim Gordon, the subject of a lawsuit filed by photographer Eric McNatt. While a smart contract may theoretically offer greater protections to the artist, it can only be enforced by someone with the resources to pursue legal action, just like any other contract.

Artists turning to NFTs for an alternative to gallery-based art sales will find that lack of regulation and unclear ownership of intellectual property in the traditional art market are problems that the blockchain exacerbates rather than eliminates. Still, many artists recognize that NFTs are already affecting the sale and valuation of art by driving a speculative market for digital works that previously did not fit comfortably into art world systems of distribution and exchange. As legal precedents are tested and technologies evolve, we are already seeing the impact of NFTs extend to the sale and circulation of physical art objects as well. For artists who feel comfortable dedicating some time and effort to an experimental, not-yet-proven platform, NFTs are an intriguing way to redefine their relationship to the market.

The project received fawning coverage from news outlets all over the world. The original Instagram post has been liked over 220,000 times, and the work has been praised as a gesture of resilience and ingenuity in the face of seemingly unsurmountable divisions. The architects included a brief statement with their post: “Children and adults were connected in meaningful ways on both sides, with the recognition that the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side.” This week, the Design Museum in London awarded Teeter-Totter Wall the Beazley Design of the Year, one of the design world’s most prestigious prizes. Beazleys are given to projects and products that contain “powerful messages of change,” says Design Museum director Tim Marlow. This year’s winners are featured in an exhibition at the museum, which is currently accessible online only.

Rael and San Fratello have been designing interventions for the border since the early 2000s, though this is the first one they’ve implemented. Rael, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, published a book in 2017 called Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the US-Mexico Boundary, which contains various “counterproposals” for the wall, including a wall of giant cacti and a wall whose slats are xylophone bars.

The duo’s video of Teeter-Totter Wall seems engineered to go viral. With its upbeat message, bright palette, and easy-to-grasp concept, it’s irresistible to liberal centrist do-gooders. Importantly, it involves adorable children with missing baby teeth smiling at the camera. That cuteness makes it great for social media. But these kids are too young to understand the significance of the border fence, or at least its more abstract function as something more than a metal divider. Their innocence makes our guilt more acute, because as adults in a democracy we have the means to tear the fence down, but we’re too lazy or too inept. Ultimately, the conceit of this project is that we’re powerless to do anything meaningful about the way this country treats migrants. If we could effect substantial change, why would we content ourselves with something so purely symbolic as this?

Rael San Fratello and Colectivo Chopeke, Teeter-Totter Wall, 2019, temporary interactive installation.

Teeter-Totter Wall is tragedy porn masquerading as protest art. It elicits an immediate, hot-blooded response from the viewer, yet invites no further reflection. Tragedy porn gestures at the mere existence of atrocity, as if bearing witness were an ethical imperative in itself. Viewers who encounter it on social media makes a very sad face and say, “Yes it’s terrible isn’t it? Really tragic.” They tacitly acknowledge their own complicity, their own weakness and selfishness for not intervening in this atrocity, and through this admission of guilt they are absolved. Having achieved cathartic release by sharing the video, they go about their day again.

By focusing on the wall as the site where the violent effects of US immigration policy are felt, Rael and San Fratello’s project tells a misleadingly selective version of the story. In reality, that violence extends to the border with Chiapas and Guatemala, where refugees coming from Central America are being held by the Mexican National Guard. It extends to US sanctuary cities like Chicago and New York, where agents from the Border Patrol Tactical Unit have assisted ICE in making immigration arrests.

The violence is often manifest in tedious bureaucratic experiences. Rarely does it take the form of anything as action-packed as physically jumping a wall. But Trump assigned outsize importance to the wall because it riled up voters who don’t understand how immigration works. This bit of political theater was so effective that some of his opponents bought it, too.

With its spectacle of sentimentality, Teeter-Totter Wall fails to provide any insight about who might be responsible for this tragedy, who benefits from it, and how we got here as a country. As John Berger once wrote in an essay on war photography, these types of artistic gestures “accuse nobody and everybody.” They provide “evidence of the general human condition,” rather than identifying causes. That’s what makes Teeter-Totter Wall so shareable on social media: nobody, not even the vigilantes patrolling the desert looking for migrants to murder, could find it controversial.

Judging by the comments below the original Instagram post, the main takeaway among viewers is that children deserve to play together. Who’s going to disagree with that? Ironically, this vague positivity depoliticizes a hot-button subject. Certainly not all the people who left Instagram comments about how walls are evil are ready to vote for a presidential candidate who would reinvent, or even reform, this country’s immigration policies. But they will decry the cruelty and unnaturalness of the scenario depicted here.

The failure of Teeter-Totter Wall, then, is twofold: it offers a superficial assessment of the situation and elicits a superficial reaction from its viewers. Circulated in the form of perfectly snackable online content, it provides viewers a path to easy armchair activism in the form of the Facebook “share” button. The public is willing to overlook the glaring mediocrity and superficiality of the work because it functions like a steam valve for their feelings of guilt and complicity. If they stopped for a moment to ask what the work is saying, how it makes them feel, or what it accomplishes, they would realize there’s really no there there.

The Design Museum and the prize’s sponsor, the global insurance company Beazley, get to share the project’s halo of benevolence by furnishing it with their top award. But if their goal was to highlight designs that carry “powerful messages of change,” then they failed spectacularly, by picking a project that simply reinforces the status quo—or more specifically, decorates it with three pink seesaws. What appears to be a cute, uplifting message is actually terrifyingly cynical: there’s nothing we can do. Rather than imagine a world with no border wall, these architects can only imagine a fun wall. That’s what happens when we mistake good intentions for good art. Not only do we encourage mediocrity—we give up hope.

View of former Farm Security Administration cleaner Ella Watson taking a picture of Gordon Parks’s 1942 photograph American Gothic.

That portrait of Ella Watson, a cleaner whom Parks got to know during his tenure with the Farm Security Administration, is a stark parody of Grant Wood’s famous painting of the same name, and prods the ways in which American racial hierarchies underwrite historical disparities in labor and workplaces. In the volume Invisible Labor, sociologists Adia Harvey Wingfield and Renée Skeete argue that certain labor-based tasks are used to maintain racial divisions. Maintenance and cleaning workers “carry out racial tasks that involve protecting, servicing, and caring for the tangible physical structure in which other, higher-status workers do the interactional and ideological forms of labor.” These structures, with their long historical lineage, take on an intangible quality that makes it extremely difficult for workers of color to resist.

In American Gothic, Watson is not performing labor: instead, the act of cleaning is implied by the mop and broom that flank her figure. By juxtaposing Watson and her tools against the American flag, Parks presents an implicit commentary on the racial and labor caste system that Watson faced. American Gothic transforms a portrait of an individual into a wider representation of the enduring daily oppression of Black Americans. Watson looks neither complacent nor resistant, but simply tired—both from a physically exhausting job and the constant prejudice she faced as a Black woman in the American South.

View of the Tennessee National Guard escorting Memphis Sanitation Workers’ protestors, 1968, in downtown Memphis, Tennessee.

The quiet discontent expressed in American Gothic anticipated the bolder protests and strikes that were part of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. February 12 marks the anniversary of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, in which 1,300 Black sanitation workers protested the unsafe labor conditions and the neglect and abuse they received from the Memphis city government. Photographs of the strike serve not only as archival documents of the movement, but also as testament to the importance of active demands for recognition. Many images show clusters of signs that proclaim I AM A MAN—a declaration that is a call for dignity and respect. Maintenance and cleaning are not inherently undignified practices, but they are cast as lowly and undignified by conventional hierarchies of labor and race.

The deployment of “essential workers” to deal with the hazardous rubble after the January 6 siege was a visual reinscription of that long-standing job bias. Comparing footage of Capitol Hill workers with historical imagery begs the question: What if they, too, had chosen to protest these unsafe working conditions? The insurrection that is rightly viewed as an attack on American democracy and its institutions also revealed subtler, historically inscribed implications. While it was necessary to sweep and scrub the Capitol Building for the safe return of cultural custodians and members of Congress—and to continue the largely ceremonial task of ballot-counting that day—one wonders if more people will now take note of the Black and brown bodies sent in to clean up the messes that white supremacists continually leave behind.

A survey from the magazine Art Handler, 2020, conducted by founder and editor-in-chief Clynton Lowry and managing editor Lucy Hunter, with results analyzed by Alyssa Harlow.

Crises are traumatic not because they cause a break from the established order, but because they reveal what is otherwise hidden or willfully ignored. The suspension of life as we know it is frightening. But it also presents a critical moment of opportunity.

Our present crisis is unfolding on two fronts: a virus that makes sociality a material threat and an economic shutdown poised to hit art workers particularly hard. The response from institutions of both governance and culture has largely been to cross their fingers and hope to wait it out, despite an understanding among epidemiologists that the crisis is not expected to abate anytime soon. When the white cubes open back up, it will mean one of two things: that the pandemic has been resolved after a significant amount of time, or that museums have successfully lobbied officials to deem their operation “essential.”

Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, I had been thinking of the experience of the 2008 financial crisis and the underanalyzed impact it had on the subsequent Post-Internet movement (which I took part in as an artist and theorist). It seems fitting that the twin collapse of finance and real estate coincided with a way of making art that reconsidered the dematerialization of the object and made a joke of the white cube. My peers and I sought to eschew studio practice by producing work with the absolute bare minimum of space and material, leaving the rest up to digital manipulation.

The movement gained momentum just as popular dissatisfaction both with the Obama administration’s handling of the bailout and with the European Union’s austerity measures began to foment into what would become Occupy Wall Street and mass actions across Europe. Yet for the most part, the art world dismissed  Post-Internet as either a speculative market feeding frenzy, or evidence that young artists had terminally overdosed on Photoshop and Tumblr. These critics missed how Post-Internet might have constituted a genuine break with the demand that contemporary artists manifest themselves as bourgeois entrepreneurs.

View of (foreground) Harm Van Den Dorpel’s installation Sol, 2010, and (background) Charles Broskoski’s ABACAB, 2010, in the online exhibition “Exhibition One,” 2010, rendered in V-Ray software by Timur Si-Qin, at Chrystal Gallery.

Some of the virtual exhibitions staged by artists at the time highlighted the illusory nature of prestige by reproducing the physical white cube as a virtual space accessible online. Reference Gallery’s January 2010 online group exhibition “Mirrors” featured various real and virtual works crudely photoshopped into images of Reference’s gallery space in Richmond, Virginia. Timur Si-Qin took a similar approach with his Chrystal Gallery, in October of that same year, which was disseminated as 3D renderings of propositional works in a traditional white cube environment.

I recall engaging in some debate at the time as to whether these projects were radical gestures or whether they merely reproduced the look of the gallery to give digital work a veneer of prestige. But, then as now, I see them as repudiating the primacy of the retail real estate environment that defines art’s presence in urban centers. For decades, artists have bent and twisted to adapt to neoliberalism’s prerogative of economic development. When a crisis splits the seams of that development apart, the art world shows its seams, too. Of the many Post-Internet commentaries on exhibition space in 2010–11, one of the simplest still stays with me. For a brief period, Czech artist Martin Kohout’s website could be visited only during “open hours” at certain times of the day, approximating the barriers to access found at the gallery or the museum. It was a reminder that galleries are  accessible only to those who have free time during common working hours and who live in (or can travel to) wealthy cities. When these socioeconomic barriers are considered in tandem with the manifold barriers to access exhibition spaces hold for people with disabilities, the art world’s current model appears not just anachronistic but ableist.

Screenshot of Katja Novitskova’s livestream sunny n shiite, 2011.

Perhaps the subtlest experiment with Post-Internet display practices was Katja Novitskova’s sunny n shiiite (2011), an extraordinarily lo-fi approach to exhibition-making that resonates particularly well now. For a weeklong livestream, Novitskova trained a webcam at a blank wall and used the flattened space of the image frame to lay out an arrangement of “found and created objects”: a mirror, a mushroom cloud of expanding foam, a banner reading “Change.” Novitskova frequently changed the layout of the arrangement and the objects on display. The piece recalled Robert Morris’s Continuous Project Altered Daily (1969), in which the artist adjusted the orientation of a selection of materials in the gallery on a daily basis.

Novitskova’s work showed how art could be presented as a spare gesture using basic tools and limited space. But now we see the art world rushing to bring commercial spaces online with as little disruption to pre-COVID operations as possible. Fairs like Art Basel Hong Kong have offered online viewing rooms, while David Zwirner is using its digital resources to present a well-manicured selection of works from smaller galleries as an act of altruism. This latter example is like an unironic reinterpretation of Kohout’s restriction of his website’s viewing hours. With Zwirner’s locations closed, its URL is its most valuable commercial property, a value underscored when it is shared with less affluent galleries.

These efforts to re-create the art world online look like the gallery websites we know already, where the pristine, sealed-off white rectangle of the browser displays equally pristine photographs of objects affixed in generic white cubes. A possible exception is the proliferation of museum screening programs, like the Whitney’s, which offer access to video works that are otherwise impossible to view without the privilege of screening attendance or a Vimeo password. But these programs beg the question of why video collections are not already online for free viewing. What does that say about the function of museums in our society?

View of the online exhibition “Mirrors,” 2010, at Reference Gallery.

We’re in the early phase of the pandemic, still adapting to a suspension of activity epidemiologists predict could last into 2022 or beyond. Museums are locked down. Galleries are shuttered. In a short text written the month after the strikes and protests in Paris in May 1968, Daniel Buren wrote that “art [is] the system’s distracting mask. And a system has nothing to fear as long as reality is masked, as long as its contradictions are hidden.”¹ What crises reveal are precisely these contradictions.

The art world we return to—if there is one to return to at all—will be formed in this moment. This is the time to build our own institutions. Our shelter-in-place orders and the masses of workers, including art workers, who were fired when the economy came to an abrupt stop constitute a general strike, leaving us only to declare it. For the art world this could be a massive moment of reorientation. While Berlin has bailed out its artists and cultural institutions, we already know the United States will do no such thing for its citizens. If we push on without solidarity outside the art world, doing what we can to maintain business as usual, we will only be putting the mask back on.

¹ In The Return of the Real (1996), Hal Foster points out that, a month before the events of May ’68, Buren plastered a work of his over another poster on the street, obscuring a call to action by the anarchist student group “Movement of March 22.” According to Sami Siegelbaum the poster read “AT NANTERRE the students have revolted against the rotting university of the bourgeoisie. Since March 22nd they have turned the premises of the university into sites of the most free expression of their ideas—the walls are covered with posters, the auditoriums are filled with meetings every day […].’ The rest of the message was obscured by Buren’s work. Though the artist later wrote against masking, his actions in April quite literally masked a message from the nascent movement. For Foster, this act posed a riddle on the relationship between the art of institutional critique and active political movements. Can art escape the exhibition and move onto the street without interfering in the political action taking place there? But there is no riddle at all. Rather than plastering over the message and expounding on the movement that issued it later, Buren simply could have joined in.