Four London Art Critics Discuss the State of Art Criticism Today

Dean Kissick, Tosia Leniarska, and Adomas Narkevičius on the Illusion of Departure

Narkevičius and Leniarska On The Decline of the West

I arrived in London just as the city, in its characteristic reserve, seemed to be quietly conceding that its era of unquestioned centrality had passed. Even the most committed defenders of Western unipolarity were beginning to reckon with its decline. Analysts like Stephen Jen—who once articulated the “Dollar Smile” theory to explain the enduring strength of the U.S. currency—now caution that a “very multipolar” currency regime may be emerging, driven by de-dollarization in the wake of geopolitical fractures and sanctions regimes (Financial Times, April 2023). Similarly, Brad Setser, long a defender of dollar centrality at the Council on Foreign Relations, has recently flagged the creeping erosion of trust in U.S. monetary stewardship, especially among non-Western economies responding to dollar weaponization. Even Adam Tooze—typically attuned to the system’s durability through crisis—has begun to register dissonance more explicitly, noting that “the dominance of the dollar is out of kilter with the increasing multipolarity of the world economy.” The Financial Times—long the oracle of global markets—sounded, for once, unsure of its own authority. On the ground, there was no crisis atmosphere, only a muted sense of something already lost. The unraveling wasn’t sudden but had settled in long ago, imperceptibly—perhaps in 2009, when the FT published Capitalism in Crisis, momentarily breaking from its usual composure. London, still polished and operational, no longer felt like the center of anything. It moved with the inertia of remembered power.

In the haze of ambient decline, I found myself at Ginny on Frederick, where Dean Kissick was speaking. The setting was a deliberate antithesis to the Harper’s panel with Red Scare, which had collapsed critique into performance, cycling through provocation-as-content until nothing stuck. There, discourse was stylized into podcast bait—closed-loop declarations about art as posting because posting is what they do. It was self-satisfied, recursive, and dulled by its own cleverness.

In contrast, Kissick’s presence in the cramped gallery space—more warehouse spillover than institution—had friction. His words didn’t describe so much as interfere. They unsettled. There was no ironic cushion, no deflection; the room absorbed the charge. What lingered wasn’t consensus but a held breath, a shared exposure to something harder to metabolize: critique that refused conversion into spectacle. It Kissick who in some sense was the highly online who had left the gallery world long ago who was clashing with more industry attuned conservatism.

The encounter quickly lost it’s spontaneity in my mind once I became aware of Leniarska’s prior remarks about Kissick. It was reported to me that she had once joked online that perhaps he—rather than his mother—should have been struck by the bus he had written about. The comment, dressed in irony, bore the incision of something more deliberate—a reminder that in these precincts, humor operates less as levity than as controlled detonation. Here, critique had already decayed into something intimate and punitive: not an ideological confrontation but the slow ritual of excommunication.

What might have appeared to the uninitiated as improvisational instead assumed the contours of design. Dean did not stumble into conflict; he was positioned for it. Once the contextual architecture came into view, it became difficult to see it otherwise. Critics affiliated with NewCrits routinely characterize Kissick as stylistically affective but conceptually void—an operator within the attention economy rather than a figure of intellectual substance. While this reading may possess its own seductive clarity, it enacts the very logic that Leniarska, in her role as moderator, seemed to bring to bear—a logic that evacuated the event of its proper stake. What transpired that evening was not an exchange but a trap. Tosia, who had previously distributed her questions with precision, adopted a tone of accusation with Dean. She ceased to moderate and began to signal, subtly corroborated by Narkevičius’ approving posture in the front row. What had been framed as a conversation resolved, finally, into a gesture of exclusion—less debate than orchestration, less dialogue than quiet purge. We as the audience unconsciously were forced to take a side and others may have wished we had a different moderator, but others may just want to know what Leniarska’s arguments were.

The Decline Continued…

After the panel ended, I was talking with Leniarska when the so-called decline of the West came up—again. Adomas Narkevičius was nodding along, even as we stood there speaking its language, under its clocks, inside institutions—well, a pub in this case—built in its image. By then the conversation had drifted beyond the art world and into something looser, more conceptual. The contradiction was obvious: only those born into the West seem to mourn its unraveling. For them, leaving is a kind of curated exit. For everyone else, arriving is necessity, and there's no safe departure.

People don’t move toward the West because they believe in it—they move because their lives depend on it. Careers, documents, basic protections. Once inside, the ladder often disappears. You’re either erased, or accused of getting too comfortable. Meanwhile, those most empowered to critique the West tend to come from its elite institutions. As We Have Never Been Woke makes painfully clear, this performance of critique often reinforces the very systems it claims to resist. When proximity to power becomes the measure of moral authority, then speaking against the West from within its strongest fortresses becomes another way of maintaining the walls.

You need the West until you don’t—but only the privileged get to choose when that moment arrives.

And then there are those who were never given the choice. Indigenous peoples, displaced communities like Palestinians—they’re told they never belonged, even as they remain tethered to the very systems that exiled, absorbed, or erased them. They don’t get to leave. They don’t get to rebrand. Their presence is both denied and used.

Capital, of course, has already escaped. It builds its own compounds—Prospera, crypto-zones, asset bubbles where no passport is needed, only liquidity. The West is no longer a fixed geography; it’s a business model. It doesn’t die. It mutates. It collapses in theory while consolidating in practice. The wealthy don’t mourn its decline—they pilot its next phase.

What went unsaid that night was perhaps the most revealing part: even the emerging powers, the ones supposedly displacing the West—China, the Gulf states, BRICS-aligned economies—often inherit its logic wholesale. Offshore finance, extractive development, prestige architecture, debt traps dressed as aid. The dream of leaving the West is haunted by its replicas. It continues not through dominance but through imitation. Its logics are everywhere, even—or especially—where it claims to be absent.

And yet something is shifting. While the West obsesses over managing its own legacy, artists, curators, and thinkers outside its field of vision are already shaping something new. They’re not seeking approval. They’re not performing critique for institutional reward. The West hasn't yet realized that it's become background noise. As Dipesh Chakrabarty argued in Provincializing Europe, Western thought never was universal—it just acted like it was. Now, other histories are being told without needing to pass through its gate.

Adomas brought this into sharper focus, pointing to artists working outside the gravitational pull of Western institutions—figures in Lithuania, China, elsewhere—who remain caught within its discourse. Their work circulates through the same biennials, is framed by the same curators, explained using the same terms. And yet these artists might also be the ones who rupture the narrative. Simply by being there, they reveal the seams. Their presence shows what the system cannot fully absorb.

Walking through the galleries, I kept thinking about that contradiction. Artists like Deimantas Narkevičius, whose work explores post-Soviet identity through a mix of mysticism and militarism, or Wang Zhibo, whose surreal landscapes document the erasure caused by urbanization, are often treated as if they only matter once legible to the West. Pavlo Makov, too—long committed to documenting Ukraine’s slow decay—was suddenly celebrated once his work could be read as a response to Russian aggression. It’s not that the work changed. It’s that the geopolitical narrative caught up.

This is the same institutional logic that has led some, like Anthony Galluzzo, to argue that we are living through our own Boris Yeltsin moment—a period of rapid de-institutionalization, in which state structures are hollowed out not in the name of democratic renewal but in service of oligarchic consolidation. If the 1990s in Russia were defined by the wholesale privatization of the economy, our present is marked by the privatization of cultural meaning itself—where memory, legacy, and legitimacy are increasingly brokered by a small class of actors who frame their gatekeeping as stewardship. In this light, the charge that Kissick’s work reasserts a kind of first-world taste enforcement begins to feel simplistic. His critique is not an affirmation of cultural supremacy but a reaction to the way critique itself has been domesticated—flattened, instrumentalized, neutralized in advance. What he offers is not nostalgia for lost authority, but a refusal of the current atmosphere’s aesthetic deadening.

Dean Kissick On Art’s Rejection of the Moment

It was at this point in the conversation that Kissick turned toward the insularity of contemporary art—how it had become a recursive loop, endlessly feeding on itself while pretending to engage with the world. He described an industry collapsing under the weight of its own self-reference, producing more than ever and yet feeling culturally diminished. There was a time, he noted, when the Venice Biennale or Whitney could define an era, when a single artist might provoke a broader reckoning. Now, they barely register outside their own echo chambers. Art had lost its capacity to function as rupture—as collision, as disturbance, as something capable of interrupting the flow.

A recurring critique of Kissick’s work is that it sidesteps direct confrontation with the algorithm formerly known as capitalism—that it lingers on aesthetic effects while avoiding structural causes. But this misunderstands the premise of his argument. For Kissick, market saturation is not a revelation but a baseline—so entrenched it renders further denunciation inert. To name it again would be to restage a critique that has already been folded into institutional life, one more loop in the self-congratulatory circuit of oppositional discourse. His focus, instead, is on the residue: not merely commodification, but the atmospheric dulling it leaves behind—the conceptual inertia, stylistic timidity, and visual over-processing that mark the present. What appears as apolitical is in fact a more acute provocation: a refusal to rehearse political critique and an attempt to trace what happens once its gestures have lost friction.

His argument, in some ways, echoes Camille Paglia’s long-held belief that art collapsed after the 1970s, that its radical potential was choked out by academic formalism, institutional gatekeeping, and a loss of connection to the raw, libidinal energy that made previous generations of artists unavoidable. But where Paglia’s critique focuses on the severing of art from sexuality, violence, and mythology, Kissick’s concern is different: he believes that contemporary art has failed not because it has become too intellectualized, but because it has refused to contend with the present moment. Instead of embracing the derangement of contemporary life, art has retreated into the past—into old forms, safe ideas, predictable craft. This argument runs through his writing, from his Harper’s piece on the Whitney Biennial to his long-standing position in Spike that contemporary culture is too optimized, too careful, too afraid of appearing unpolished or irrational.

"Art is often best when it’s absolutely deranged. We are irrational, incoherent beings, and artists and writers should embrace this once more... you should use that magic for greater causes than propagating a polite, liberal American sensibility."

At the core of Kissick’s critique is a refusal of smoothness—consensus aesthetics, liberal piety, frictionless legibility. The crisis isn’t capital per se, but hypernormalization: art and media so managed, so polished, they lose all irregularity. Not just commodified—regularized. The rupture is gone. As Kissick puts it, “humans have begun to act like algorithms.” Art no longer meets the world’s disorder; it preempts its metrics.

The result is a landscape in which art is no longer a place of rupture or unpredictability, but an endless stream of optimized content, micro-targeted at institutional and market expectations. He describes the contemporary moment as one in which we demand too much, too fast, reducing creativity to a process of filling quotas, and created a paint-by-numbers effect.

The crisis is not just that art has been commercialized—it’s that all of life has become a form of endless optimization, leading to a world where even computer science departments are beginning to replace their own faculty with algorithms. The tendency toward automated, predictive thinking has crept into every part of culture, affecting the way people speak, the way they write, the way they make decisions. If the avant-garde once worked against the flattening of human experience, Kissick argues that today’s art world has, in many ways, embraced it.

This is why he has taken such an interest in immaterial art online—the potential of digital objects, things you can edit and manipulate on your phone, that exist outside of the gallery’s rigid structures. But the promise of digital art is complicated. While some see the internet as a space of radical possibility, others, like Sam Buntz, have argued that social platforms have become their own kind of hypernormalization engine, producing aesthetic work that mimics culture without actually challenging it. If Kissick is right that the market forces art to reject the present, Buntz’s critique suggests that the alternative—the art made for and within digital spaces—is even worse, existing in a state of perpetual flattening, a feedback loop where newness is immediately absorbed and neutralized. If this is the new frontier Kissick is pointing toward, what would it take to break out of it—or even to imagine rupture again in a world so fully optimized that even its decline feels pre-processed, flattened into forecasts and trendlines?

Not everyone agreed with Kissick’s framing, or Tosia’s challenges, or Adomas’s interventions. Some critics would say the entire debate was misplaced—that contemporary art was neither collapsing nor retreating but shifting, adapting to conditions that had always been unstable. I tend to think it has drifted online, as Kissick argues, into platforms like Cloudyheart. Jerry Saltz might call this moment business as usual: art has always been excessive, self-referential, teetering on the edge of implosion. Hal Foster would argue that subversion still survives within the marketplace, tucked into minor gestures and formal disobedience. Hito Steyerl would likely reject the framing altogether, insisting that art and digital media are already indistinct, and that the very question of "where art is" misses the point. Tooze has made the geopolitical version of this case clear—what looks like decline from one vantage is actually reordering. China, India, the Gulf: these aren’t just inheriting the global system. They’re reauthoring it.

The crisis, then, may be real—but its center is not where we keep looking.

Later, walking through London, I passed a group of children gathered around a burst water pipe, watching it bubble up through the cracks. Their parents stood off to the side, distracted, waiting for the world to resume its shape. But the kids stayed with it, absorbed in something both ordinary and strange. It reminded me of a passage in Provincializing Europe, where Chakrabarty writes of floods not as catastrophe but interruption—a kind of pause in history’s forward momentum, where time no longer marches but spills, leaks, unsettles.

I thought of that as I stood there. Of all our attempts to name the moment, to assign it a narrative—decline, crisis, reset, fragmentation. Maybe we’re too quick to diagnose collapse because we still expect history to center us. Maybe the thing that matters isn’t what's ending, but what keeps surging up through the cracks—quietly, insistently, refusing to follow the plot.

Li and The Critic in Disarticulation

And yet, for all the friction in the room, the most pointed shift in perspective didn’t come from the clash between Kissick and Leniarska, or the ambient performance of alignment and exclusion, but from Claire Li. Where others engaged in confrontation or deflection, Li quietly reframed the terms. Her intervention didn’t escalate the debate—it relocated it. The real subject, she suggested, wasn’t the art, or even the artists, but the critic: where she speaks from, whom she addresses, and what remains of the public capable of receiving her thought. It was a recalibration—away from spectacle, toward structure.

Li reminds us that criticism hasn’t vanished—it has simply been dislodged from the structures that once gave it coherence and weight. What remains are fugitive forms: scattered fragments on social media, private chats, marginal journals, and unread Substacks. Critique now moves laterally, often unnoticed, because the platforms that once sustained it have either collapsed or been repurposed to favor visibility over thought. In one telling example, Li recalls how the sharpest reading of a recent exhibition came not from within the art world, but from a biotech investor—a moment that, however absurd, revealed how critical insight now emerges wherever time, focus, and uncommodified attention still survive. The implication is clear: critique persists, but off-grid—improvised, peripheral, and increasingly invisible to the systems that once sought to contain it.

Dean Kissick’s account of Zombie Formalism and Kenny Schachter’s embrace of critique-as-spectacle both mark the fallout from criticism’s detethering. Kissick captures what art begins to look like under platform rationality—formulaic, self-optimizing, dead-on-arrival. Schachter offers a hyperactive workaround: visibility without friction, commentary as self-branding. But Li’s comments quietly insist that the problem is not just the work, or the spectacle, but the loss of a shared space in which criticism might unfold as a sustained act of thinking.

The essay closes by returning to her frame—not to pick a side, but as redirection. If criticism no longer resides in sanctioned platforms, it doesn’t mean it’s over. It means it’s elsewhere. To track it now requires a different kind of attention, one willing to take seriously the informal, the transitory, the peripheral. The critic remains—but in motion, uninvited, and increasingly unread by those still looking for her in the old places.

Still, Li’s formulation, while astute in diagnosing the exile of criticism from its traditional precincts, risks romanticizing that disarticulation as a new site of vitality—when in fact it may be little more than an alibi for its ongoing neutralization. As Groys reminds us, visibility has long since ceased to imply autonomy; the conditions of circulation have become indistinguishable from the conditions of capture. Joselit’s networked images are not merely fragments; they are fragments whose coherence is manufactured precisely by their incoherence—modular, frictionless, and already integrated into the architecture of managed attention. The supposed fugitivity of critique is not immune to these dynamics; it is often their softest expression.

Even Bruguera’s institutional provocations, which once operated as tactical irritants within dominant forms, now risk being mistaken for gestures of inside-outside politics that no longer hold. To mistake dispersion for radicality, or to equate fragmentation with agency, is to forget that power has always tolerated noise so long as it remains directionless. What Li names as exile may in fact be the most perfected form of acquiescence: the critic as itinerant, not out of refusal but because there is nowhere left to stand. The loss is not just spatial or institutional, but temporal and epistemic—the inability to build duration, to sustain pressure, to demand consequences beyond visibility.

If critique now lives in scattered, half-legible murmurs—in tweets, group chats, provisional newsletters, or the ambient lamentations of the cultural essay—then its survival may no longer depend on its ability to speak truth to power, but on its capacity to refuse intelligibility on power’s terms. And yet even this feels insufficient. There is a difference between opacity as resistance and obscurity as exhaustion. One begins to wonder whether the critic is now less an agent than an artifact, a residue of a public that no longer exists—or worse, a figure condemned to mimic publicness in its absence.

The question is no longer whether critique can be relocated, but whether it can still be recognized as such—whether there remains a grammar for disobedient thought that is not immediately metabolized by the very systems it seeks to disturb. This is not a call for return, nor a plea for reinstitutionalization. It is simply a recognition, bleak and unresolved, that critique may persist not in its visible enactments but in its continued misrecognitions—in the refusal to settle, the failure to land, the unresolved demand that something else, still unnamed, must be possible.

Note: This is the first draft. I’ve asked for the critics involved to provide more details about their talk. I plan to add further comment from Claire Li who isn’t currently addressed in this article along with Leniarska, and Narkevičius. Thank you Darla Migan and Ajay Kurian from NewCrits for your input.