We need to stop fucking around with theory.
—Joshua Clover1
For some, “contemporary art” was a seemingly endless thrill, a dizzying spin of biennials, gallery openings, philosophical soirées, “open bars, sex, and glamour too.”2 In a Harper’s article, published on the threshold of the second Trump era and presaging its cultural logics, American art critic Dean Kissick reminisces about partaking in “a globalized circuit of biennials and fairs that ran on the international trade of ideas and commodities,” an unparallelled global experiment in cultural forms unfolding across an ever-expanding “space of spectacle and innovation,” where artists enjoyed “the freedom of absolute purposelessness.”
For Kissick, who belongs to a cohort of millennial art professionals, the idea of contemporary art as a globally unrestrained social laboratory for cultural experimentation, progress, and innovation provided a free pass to speculate and travel wildly, battering down the walls between intuition and intellect, object and idea, philosophy and reality. In Kissick’s narration of art’s most recent past, seemingly disparate philosophical ideas as “deconstruction, poststructuralism, speculative realism, accelerationism, pataphysics, [and] psychogeography” form part of a theoretical panoply that propped up contemporary art and made it possible—even for a mediocrity like Kissick—to “feel part of a vanguard.”
But the philosophical splendor of contemporary art, in Kissick’s analysis, has been in steady decline and the “theoretical frameworks” for art are now completely “dominated by the language of decolonial or queer theory”—which apparently threatens to undermine the philosophical integrity of art with a capital A.
In a faint and distorted echo of Adorno at his most reactionary, Kissick argues that when art becomes too directly political or tries to communicate some kind of legible political agenda, it loses its potentially subversive edge:
Art should do more than communicate: it should move us; it should make us weep; it should bring us to our knees. It is, along with music, the purest expression of the human spirit. It is an important part of what makes us human—the most important part—and constitutes a continuum of yearning passed down the centuries that can be felt in every great museum or Renaissance chapel.
Although Kissick mistakenly projects a distinctly modern understanding of art as “the purest expression of the human spirit” back to the Renaissance—ignoring the historicity of the concept of “art” as one that emerges over the course of the eighteenth century when the capitalist mode of production achieved its social fixity in Western societies3—he seems to intuit that the conditions that sustained the social category of art have since long eroded—the “continuum” forever broken and beyond repair. Everything falls apart.
But since Kissick is incapable of thinking about the obsolesce of art in materialist terms, the end of neoliberal globalization and contemporary art’s constitutive role within it appear to him as so many symptoms of spiritual and aesthetic decline. The decline of the West as contemporary art criticism.
What is concerning about Kissick’s yearning for an imaginary yet oddly “contemporary” past is how it expresses an in-group fantasy that conceives of “art” as the unchanging essence of true human freedom instead of what it ultimately is: a fictional bourgeois category that arises from and will wither with the capitalist relations of production in which it arose.
For all its seething white ressentiment ever so thinly disguised as aesthetic concern, Kissick’s essay does prompt a much needed reflection on the relationship between theory and artistic practice within and beyond the “contemporary.” What is the role of theory in relation to “art”—traditionally positioned in philosophical discourse as a sort of placeholder for creative resistance and even emancipation? And how does this role change when the historical coordinates for theorizing art—modern, avant-garde, or contemporary—reveal themselves, as Eunsong Kim details in her recent book The Politics of Collecting, to have been fundamentally tethered to the legal fiction of white property? Starting from such considerations, what follows is an attempt to provide a brief—and therefore necessarily schematic—sketch of the role of theory in relation to (contemporary) art. The point of this short essay is to provide an outline of a communist theory of art that is thoroughly incompatible with late fascist sentiments.4
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In seeking to understand contemporary art’s peculiarly incestuous relationship to certain forms of “theory,” it should be borne in mind that theoretical trends express not only the forms but also the material conditions of said artistic practice.
Key here is the postwar advent of cybernetics and automation, which, as I have argued at length elsewhere, prefigures the transition from modern to contemporary art and marks a threshold in the way artistic practice is conceived, talked about, and, well, theorized.5 What Guy Debord, a keen observer of this historical shift, characterized as the “chill dream of structuralism,” and which in post-situationist thought has become theorized as “the cybernetic hypothesis,” is indicative of a broad intellectual and political reorientation of the relationship between theory and practice that also pertains to discussions of contemporary art.6
To briefly summarize: “theory,” in its most disembedded “structuralist” forms, emerged from a transatlantic hotbed of cybernetics, information theory, and Saussurian linguistics in the wake of the Second World War. Strategically supported by large US research foundations that were effectively fronts for the CIA, cybernetically inflicted concepts, theories, and categories quickly gained institutional primacy in academic and para-academic settings in the US and across Western Europe.7
What happens on the level of “theory” during the 1950s and ’60s, in other words, is a strategic levelling of the philosophical playing field, a turn to horizontal, lean, and infinitely flexible forms of thought under the combined and uneven impact of US-led economic postwar reconstruction programs such as the Marshall Plan. Under immense political-economic pressures on the institutions of knowledge production—universities and research institutions in particular—but also increasingly on the institutions of an expanding art world, the established ontological hierarchies that had sustained Marxism and much of critical theory seemingly began to collapse.
By the time of another collapse, that of the Berlin wall in 1989, the idea of the philosophically stable Subject as a locus for sense-making—political, aesthetic, and otherwise—had largely dissipated, dissolved through various lines of flight, in the process of expanding into “planetary” dimensions. In the theoretical interregnum where the philosophical Subject was dying and its replacement was still struggling to be born, a great variety of morbid acronyms appeared: STS, ANT, OOO, SR, and many more.8
“Theory,” however, not only filled the gaps in the structure of critical thought with meaningless acronyms but also functioned as a lubricant for the gears of the emerging global art market around the turn of the millennium, sustaining “art’s speculative ontology” as coterminous with its financial counterparts, or what Marina Vishmidt calls “the operative closures of ‘really existing speculation.’”9
The material infrastructures supporting the “biennial boom” and the build-out of prestigious art museums across the globe were only part of what enabled the rise of contemporary art: a process deeply entangled with financialization that facilitated the accumulation of wealth among the already wealthy.10
Perhaps equally crucial to the global outgrowth and symbolically mediated value of the contemporary art market were its more intangible and “theoretical” supports across the board, from the October-school art critic, theory-savvy MFA programs, the Hans Ulrich Obrist–style curator, and the entire professional “art advisor” class which helped maintain the global circulation of art commodities, justified their astronomical pricing, and conferred institutional legitimacy on what is, essentially, a pyramid scheme for the billionaire class.
Ultimately, art’s globalization depends on a series of transnational temporal and spatial “fixes”—a term that, following Michael Shane Boyle’s recent work on art and logistics, points to a comprehensive reorganization of both material and intellectual supply chains in art.11 The logistical reorganization of art, then—partly reliant on the cybernetic nexus of management, communication, and control—underpins not only artistic production but also its theoretical scaffolding: consider, for instance, the difference between a Marxist understanding of the term “circulation” as tied to the social intricacies of the value form versus its disembodied use as a free-floating signifier for art and images in the age of “heterogenous networks.”12
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Theory is what theory does. A communist theory of art is tasked not with providing “complexity and nuance” for works of art or for inventing new metaphors but with analyzing the social conditions of aesthetic categories themselves and reorienting (art) theory towards the “horizon of abolition.”13
What could “abolition” mean in relation to art?14 Most obviously, it means learning from past and present abolitionist struggles—taking inspiration from Black revolutionary communists like W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and many others—and refusing to lend credibility to institutions of art that are actively involved, however opaquely, in state-sanctioned forms of racialized violence, murder, exclusion, and forms of repression on political grounds—most pressingly in relation to the US-funded genocide in Gaza.
Nicole Eisenman, The Abolitionists in the Park, 2020-2022. Courtesy of the artist.
While the concept of abolition is inseparable from the history of Black struggles since the abolition of chattel slavery—and remains wedded to an idea of a society without prisons, police, and the corollary legal institutions of white private property, or what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery”15—contemporary proponents of abolition are extending this line of thought to other aspects of everyday life under capitalist relations of production, including art practices critically oriented towards abolition.16
Yet another strand of abolitionist thought is informed by post-1960s heterodox Marxisms—including value-form theory, feminism, autonomism, and intersectional approaches—and interrogates seemingly foundational categories of social existence such as property, work, and the family form. Here, the work of M. E. O’Brien stands out.17 Abolition, from this view, is essentially a continuation of a Marxist critique of alienated forms of life which include, as Marx himself noted in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, “religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc.”
The call to abolish art, following the same list of terms from which O’Brien takes note, begins by recognizing “art” as a modality of a singular and historically unique coercive structure—capitalism—and to refute the idea that it is a transhistorical reality extending back to times immemorial and continuing in invariant form across shifting social and economic formations with no possible end in sight. Rather, forms of social existence, including “art,” are also historically specific to the capitalist mode of production, which ultimately governs their intercourse and determines their place and function in the social “totality” founded on the institution of private property.
The relationship between art and theory, as oriented towards abolition, thus implies what we might call a “categorical” critique of art. On this view, “art” is not something to be realized, a pure human “essence” awaiting its emancipation, but rather something to be abolished, an obstacle to be cleared on the path forward. The abolitionist imperative here is to critically examine and expose how race, property, and the category of art coexist historically and mutually determine each other on the plane of capitalist social ontology and to show how the bourgeois category of art functions, as in the case of Kissick, as a reservoir for unexamined humanist assumptions brimming with white exceptionalism.
A critical study of art begins by rejecting the arbitrary coordinates of “art history” and seeks instead to explain how and why certain aesthetic tropes, ideas, and concepts emerge “ready-made,” so to speak, and morph into socially accepted avant-garde art forms.18 In place of the contemporary art world’s endless attempts to rejuvenate art through formal innovations, we might instead look to abolitionist practices that seek to dismantle the very institutions and categories that separate “art” from life and that exceptionalize and shield artistic practices from political demands.
From the standpoint of such an “art abolitionism,” it is immediately clear that Kissick’s conception of art as an unbroken “continuum” of cultural greatness and superiority since the Renaissance ventriloquizes the interests of a nondescript brotherhood (fascio) hell-bent on preserving their cultural supremacy in a time of crisis for white subjectivity. This crisis is rooted in historical developments themselves concomitant with the postwar “structuralist” offensive that called into question the notion of the subject and, with it, the following theoretical fixities: the proletariat, class antagonism, and the party as the emblematic form of revolutionary organization, among other things.
This is of course a historically complex process, with countless productive cross-pollinations between structuralist forms of thought and more traditional approaches to critical theory, and one that sits uneasily with any neat historical periodization schemes. Nonetheless, we can slightly adapt Roland Simon’s attempt at periodization to understand the current predicament.19 What is at stake in the withering of “programmatism” is perhaps not simply that a nondescript working class identity ceases to function as an organizing pivot for revolutionary struggles because of the “restructuring” of capital, but that established working-class institutions—the party, the union, etc.—prove increasingly obsolete because they only ever represented a particular white subset of the global proletariat. The new cycle of struggles, then, is as much the result of internal pressures, forcing “theory” to keep up with anti-colonial and abolitionist practices as they unfold across an uneven sequence of historical events.
A communist or abolitionist theory of art, then, begins from a critical reckoning with “abolition”—its meaning, its conflicted legacies, and its continued relevance—which, in the ruins of programmatism, seems to define the future of revolution.20 Historically and politically situated at the crossroads between Hegelian Marxism and Black radicalism, the concept of abolition is fraught with productive tensions between these two partially overlapping traditions of revolutionary thought that continue to inform our present moment and from which any critical—which is to say anti-capitalist—theory of art needs to take lessons.21
In memoriam.
Dean Kissick, “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art,” Harper’s, December 2024. All quotes from Kissick are from this article.
Dave Beech, “Art and the Politics of Eliminating Handicraft,” Historical Materialism 27, no. 1 (2019).
See Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism (Polity, 2021); and Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023).
Dominique Routhier, With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation (Verso, 2023).
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books, 1995), 142; Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis, trans. Robert Hurley (Semiotext(e), 2020).
See Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, CODE: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke University Press, 2023).
Peter Osborne, “The Planet as Political Subject?,” New Left Review, no. 145 (January–February 2024).
Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, 2018), x.
See Nizan Shaked, Museums and Wealth (Bloomsbury, 2022); Sam Lefebvre, A Generous Grift: Museums, Finance Capital, and the Clash of Cultural Workers and Collector-Trustees (Oakland Print Shop, 2022); and Dana Kopel, “Is It Time to Abolish museums?,” The Nation, May 25, 2021 →.
Michael Shane Boyle, The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2024).
See for example David Joselit, After Art (Princeton University Press, 2013).
See Charmaine Chua, “Abolition Is A Constant Struggle: Five Lessons from Minneapolis,” Theory & Event 23, no. 4 (2020).
See Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr, “The Self-Abolition of the Poet,” Jacket2, January 2, 2014 →; Andreas Petrossiants, “Preliminary Notes toward a Destituent Art,” Social Text 159, no. 2 (June 2024); and Seb B. Grossmann, “Abolition,” in “Keywords for Value and Culture,” special issue, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (forthcoming).
Saidiya Hartman, “A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route,” Narrative, Winter 2007 →.
See for instance Ciarán Finlayson, Perpetual Slavery (Floating Opera Press, 2023).
M. E. O’Brien, Family Abolition (Pluto, 2023).
See for instance Eunsong Kim’s brilliant repositioning of Duchamp and the ready-made in The Politics of Collecting (Duke University Press, 2024).
Roland Simon, Histoire critique de l’ultragauche (Senonevero, 2015).
See Jasper Bernes, The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising (Verso, 2025).
See Fred Moten, “the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me,” in perennial fashion presence falling (Wave Books, 2023) →: “art don’t work / for abolition. / art works for / bosses, like you / and me. if ‘let’s / abolish art’ sounds / too close to ‘let’s / abolish you and / me,’ it’s ’cause it / is.”