Over the past three decades, the global art world has thrived thanks to the infrastructures of peak globalization; it has consequently internalized value systems that are embedded in the alignment between liberal democracy, the progressive state, and neoliberal metrics of economic stability. This alignment produces auxiliary notions in the art world that operate quite self-sufficiently—notions about certain artistic forms of production or distribution that embody liberal and progressive values in themselves, and about artistic “freedom” as a condition, rather than a product, of the system.
Kojève’s journey from philosophy to diplomacy was not a case of accidental wandering but the outgrowth of his Hegelian convictions. He held that critique without action is frivolous, dismissing the “fundamentally nihilist elements, known as ‘intellectuals,’ for whom non-conformity is in itself an absolute value”—those who, like Albert Camus, reveled in moral dissent yet sidestepped the arduous institutional work needed for durable change. A critique, Kojève said, that wants to be taken seriously cannot operate at a distance from the state.
Enwezor’s International Biennial of Contemporary Art Seville dwelled on dark post-9/11 themes of war, terrorism, migration, and the extractivist nature of neoliberal capitalism. As I write, two unjust conflicts rage in Ukraine and Palestine; the second BIASC showed that the effects of such wars on art and exhibition-making can be deep and long-lasting, resurfacing years later. The exhibition participated in the wave of perennialization that took hold in the early twenty-first century, but also tempered the enthusiasm for the new neoliberal world order that was solidifying around the globe.