What does post-woke art look like?

This discussion took place at the Battle of Ideas 2025, on Sunday 19 October, Church House, Westminster, London, UK.

In December last year, critic Dean Kissick, in an article for Harper’s Magazine, caused controversy in the contemporary art world. He complained that the ‘fascination with identity’ was lending to a ‘nostalgic turn to history’. The ‘socially conscious turn’ of the early 2010s, he said, meant prestigious galleries were overwhelmed with works that were ‘progressive in content but conservative in form’, noting that ‘everyone in the world of contemporary art wants to revive a tradition, however recent’. What is lacking, he wrote, is much that is ‘inventive or interesting’.

Perhaps this wave of progressivism is over. Commentators have heralded Trump’s second term as a ‘vibe shift’ and a rejection of identity politics. Following the cues of New York’s postliberal ‘Dimes Square’ subculture, youth-oriented ‘post-woke’ cultural scenes have popped up in major cities.

But the same issues arise in these enclaves: few of the emerging works appear visually or ideologically new. For example, New York’s Fiume Gallery greeted Trump’s ‘spiritual insurrection’ by adopting the accelerationist ideals of the Italian Futurists and the neoclassical look of online ‘vaporwave’. Fashion designer Elena Velez shocked magazine editors by taking aesthetic cues from Gone with the Wind. And in June, ‘dark enlightenment’ figure Curtis Yarvin put in a bid to represent the United States at the 2026 Venice Biennale with a pavilion themed around Titian’s Rape of Europa.

‘Art wants to break taboos’, Yarvin told Vanity Fair. But artists have been trying to break taboos since the age of Duchamp’s urinal. Will these latest provocations continue to resound when even the president himself relies on social-media shock tactics?

How will a post-woke age affect the output of the contemporary art world? What role should artists take in the ‘vibe shift’? Will new styles emerge to greet this new political landscape – or did the roots of our old artistic stagnancy lie in something deeper than identity politics? And after years of a political controversy-offence cycle, is there still potential for grassroots provocation?

Speakers

Dr JJ Charlesworth, Art critic; editor, ArtReview

Pierre d’Alancaisez, Co-founder, Verdurin; art critic, The Critic

Maria Lisogorskaya, Artist; co-founding member, Assemble,

Dr Ella Nixon, Art historian and writer; post-doctoral researcher, University of Cambridge

Chair: Vicky Richardson, architectural writer and curator; former head of architecture and Drue Heinz Curator, Royal Academy of Arts,

We are grateful to the Battle of Ideas 2025 team for recording and allowing us to podcast this discussion here.