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THE HOTLY ANTICIPATED PANEL THAT WAS ACTUALLY PRETTY BORING

Welcome to 2025! We’re barely two weeks in, and thousands of acres of stunning Southern California landscape have already gone up in smoke, while our president-elect has just been formally sentenced as a felon in Manhattan. In times like these, many turn to art for solace or guidance. But hold on—last we checked, wasn’t everyone agreeing that art was, well… kind of dead?

In late November, you’ll recall, Harper’s published critic Dean Kissick’s 7,000-word jeremiad, “The Painted Protest,” that condemned the effects of identity politics on art, specifically pointing out museum shows and biennials from the last decade that aligned themselves with what he termed “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.”

The essay was polarizing, as so many things are these days. Two popular rebuttals were published by the Village Voice and Cultured. X and Reddit lit up in debate over whether the article was too strident, or not strident enough. In a manner that called to mind one of Kissick’s main points in his text, the conversation around his essay almost became more real than the text itself. Rolling into the new year, it was clear that this conversation was not quite over. 

Thus, I welcome you to Dean Kissick’s panel discussion last night at the SVA Theatre in New York with the hosts of the notorious Red Scare podcast, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova. If you need more information on what makes Red Scare relevant, I encourage you to close your laptop now, pat yourself on the back, and keep doing whatever it is you’ve been doing for the past 10 years. They haven’t found a cure for brain rot yet. For the rest of you, let’s continue.

To start, I’ll just run down the vibe. Frankly, I was expecting an entirely different evening than the one that transpired. I’m no stranger to Red Scare, and its ability to enrage or delight. So I was surprised to be so devastatingly bored by the conversation. I anticipated that I’d be furiously jotting down callous pull-quotes, cavalier defenses of cancelled artists, and caustic hot-takes about why art can’t change the world. I anticipated a room thick with generational agita and disillusioned apathy. Instead, I was met with something a bit more earnest, and a lot more dull (though I will note that the person sitting in front of me was in the exact outfit that the alleged UHC CEO-assassin Luigi Mangione wore to court, so that’s something).

A lot of the conversation remained in fairly shallow waters. “Did social media ruin art?” (Kind of, they all agreed.) “What even is art?” (“Podcasts AREN’T ART!” yelled one heckler, which Kissick chewed over, inconclusively, for a few minutes.) “Wasn’t art more fun when we were in our 20s?” The meat of Kissick’s text wasn’t really interrogated so much as it was tacitly agreed with by the Red Scare hosts.

One of the better quips from the talk was Khachiyan’s bold claim that “everybody was better off when people were getting wasted and blowing down lines at Gavin Brown dinners.” (No argument there.) Another striking moment came when the three speakers—aged between 33 and 41—reflected on whether their malaise stemmed from simply getting older and more jaded. “If something’s not for you, you can just leave. I’m much happier now,” Kissick remarked, referencing Andrew Norman Wilson’s notorious “goodbye to all that” essay in The Baffler.

Nekrasova, who remained pretty quiet throughout the discussion, chimed in to agree that Pop Art was a definitive movement that rendered all consequential art irrelevant. She also described Donald Trump as “a reality artist,” citing the absurdity of his suggestion to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Both Khachiyan and Nekrasova later hesitantly admitted to seeing themselves as artists, Nekrasova framing her public persona as a kind of performance (“I’m actually doing, like, a whole new thing”), while Khachiyan cited her experience creating “racist and sexist drawings” when she was 10 years old.

Sure, why not.

The meatiest moment came about 20 minutes in, when Kissick brought up the barrage of hate he got about his essay, and observed that no one really stood up for the institutions or the exhibitions he critiqued. (Namely, the Venice Biennale, the Barbican Art Gallery, Documenta, and the Whitney Biennial.) Mostly, he said, “I sensed a very widespread contempt for curators, and for how mainstream institutions are being run.” Khachiyan deadpanned her response, “Well, all these different institutions that we take for granted seem to be failing anyways… no one believes in them anymore.”

The event felt like a wasted opportunity. More interesting to me were the conversations I heard in the lobby on the way out. The event had sold out, mostly with what appeared to be eager art school kids. I overheard two of them in discussion: 

“I guess the panel format is kind of doomed. Now that I think about it… how could a panel ever go successfully?”

“I hate the question of what is art. That’s like, one of my least favorite questions in the world.”

I ran into the artist Nicole Eisenman, who suggested that maybe I should use my column to suggest that Kissick serve as the curator for a future Venice Biennale. It’s not a bad idea, and he did explicitly say he’d like to curate a large project if someone would pay him to do it. She was with her niece Anna Eisenman, a recent MFA grad who studied visual and digital art. “I liked that Dean believes in great art, and believes in aesthetic experiences,” the younger Eisenman said. “I don’t think the Red Scare girls really believe in art, though.”

I asked the curator Lola Kramer why she thought the conversation was so flat. She lamented that there weren’t any discordant voices present, either on the stage or asking a question in the audience. “We can’t learn anything with only one side represented,” Kramer noted. “It’s boring when everyone wants to just talk in a hall of mirrors.” Critic and curator Jeppe Ugelvig, who stood up and left the event early, texted me, “Lots of great ideas came up, but this self-indulging ‘hot take’ approach so typical of their podcast prohibits them, and us, [from] really following these arguments to their logical conclusion.” He added, “No one left smarter but only more hopeless.”

My lasting impression from the evening was that art rhetoric seems to be in a mangled gridlock. Ironically, the lifelessness of the panel actually proved one of the central arguments in Kissick’s essay, which is that solipsistic dialogue defeats itself. At the end of the talk’s Q-and-A section, I asked Kissick if any of the criticism that his essay received stuck with him. The question stumped him, and the evening ended before he could give me a straight answer. This morning, in an Instagram DM, he told me that some criticism he received made him wonder if a “more hard-lined approach” to disavowing certain “complicated crises in art” would have been more effective. “But everybody is so polite now,” he said. “Myself included.”

WE HEAR 

 

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There have been a number of Downtown developments since I saw you last. Henry Street stalwart No Gallery announced that it closed its doors after a five-year run. Supreme‘s creative director, Adam Zhu, opened an art space on his apartment’s roof deck shed called Market Gallery, beginning with a by-appointment show by Andrew Kass. A little ways uptown, off of Bowery, Amanita announced that it’s snapped up Salon 94‘s location at 1 Freeman Alley to use in addition to its flagship spot at the former CBGB space, where it made its uber-clouted mark… Kids actor (and former Henry Street gallery owner) Leo Fitzpatrick has curated a photography show by Kids director Larry Clark at Ruttkowski;68, which runs through mid-February… Check out how cavalierly Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou plunked a Bearbrick right next to his $37 million Basquiat!… Apparently chef Daniel Humm, Francesco Clemente’s business partner in the newly opened Clemente Bar, has taken over the lease of the beloved EN Brasserie… And finally, I won’t pretend to know what’s going on with Jerry Gogosian’s Instagram right now, but I do congratulate the lucky person who snagged some old running pants for $1,900 from the account’s recent sale…