Symposium: The End of Contemporary Art—How Did Radical Culture Become So Conservative?

steirischer herbst is pleased to announce a two-day symposium featuring a keynote by Peter Osborne and talks and discussions with Noit Banai, Diedrich Diederichsen, Octavian Eșanu, Anselm Franke, Jörg Heiser, and Antonia Majaca.

For three decades, “contemporary art” functioned not merely as an aesthetic label but as an expansive, self-legitimizing globalist paradigm: postconceptual, discursive, politically committed, and institutionally triumphant. Today, that paradigm faces a profound geopolitical and formal crisis.

The central driver of this change is the global rise of authoritarianism, the crisis of Western postwar democracy, and the seamless co-optation of contemporary art’s visual and discursive vocabulary by illiberal regimes. Authoritarian states are not always rejecting modernity fully but remain immensely trend-sensitive. When progressive contemporary art turns away from critical reflexivity and universalist emancipation toward atmospheric immersion, localism, “healing,” and traditional craft, it inadvertently produces an aesthetic language congenial to nationalism and worse. Meanwhile, the hope for international art as a space for productive conflicts has seemingly eroded, frustrated by a pervasive climate of ideological polarization. 

This symposium asks: Will contemporary art survive today’s culture wars, and if so, on what terms? Can its progressive vocabulary serve as a soft-power instrument of global authoritarianism, or will the autocrats simply ban it altogether as something incorrigible? And why has the cultural Left allowed its radical traditions to lapse into an easily co-opted regime of decoration and virtue signaling?

The symposium falls on the final weekend of the exhibition of steirischer herbst ’26—Red Flags at Griesplatz 34, 8020 Graz, open through November 15.

A detailed schedule and more information are available here.

If you wish to attend the symposium, we kindly ask you to register by November 11.

Convened by Ekaterina Degot, David Riff, and Pieternel Vermoortel