That “righteousness” and “intransigence,” in their common usage, have seemingly become synonyms is something worth exploring elsewhere.
Art-historically, it hasn’t always been so. For example, countercultures from the beatniks and punk to slacker and raver culture are political precisely through their refusal of socially expected or accepted responsibilities.
Alongside the fortification of conservative political views on the right, this immediacy may very well explain a growing anti-intellectualism in other milieus.
In the context of contemporary art, mediation should therefore not be understood as an artwork’s need for external validation, such as a curatorial press release or pedagogical programs.
Spencer Kornhaber, “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” The Atlantic, May 5, 2025.
That sincerity itself has become cynical is a different story, again related to the vicissitudes of economic survival in times of quotidian apocalypse.
The obituary for neoliberalism spans academic publications and journalism, from Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (Oxford University Press, 2022) to Louis Menand’s “The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism,” New York Times, July 2023.
This is only an apparent contradiction. From cinema franchises and remakes to the repetition of aesthetic forms and political topics in contemporary art, the zombie-revival of the same creates the conditions for a forgetfulness of art-historical precedents, ready to be sold as new. My occasional teaching of art students internationally has alerted me to this shocking amnesia, where every form is available instantly but without any genealogical depth, a tendency that is only accelerating with AI. A critical contribution that teachers can make is to help students to place their practices within, after, or against the genealogies with which they often unwittingly enter into dialogue.
This reciprocity began well before modernism; think of ancient Greek heroic ideals or the Sistine Chapel.
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012).
As with other Frankfurt School philosophers, mediation plays a key role in Adorno’s art theory.
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024), 197.