In this series of original, non-commissioned essays published by Art Industry Insights With Reena Devi, arts journalist and editor Reena Devi confronts how creativity is being flattened and obscured in favor of safety and spin at this critical point in history.
In December 2011, co-founder of Spy magazine and bestselling author of Evil Geniuses: Unmasking America, Kurt Andersen, wrote an essay for Vanity Fair, observing that American fashion, art, music, design, entertainment evolved considerably every 20 years or so, but in our time, popular style has been “stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating new”, despite technological and scientific leaps.
More recently, Caitlin Dewey, the former digital culture critic at The Washington Post, interviewed designer and writer Jarrett Fuller for her newsletter on this very same trend specifically in relation to graphic design and visual culture.
According to Fuller, “In a lot of ways, every decade prior to the 1990s had a distinct graphic design style, more or less — you could look at a piece of graphic design and say ‘oh, that’s from the ‘60s, that’s from the ‘70s.’ But you really can’t do that anymore. Maybe a little bit around Y2K or the early 2000s, but everything else has blurred together.”
“It’s a repetition of everything that has happened before. It’s not limited to graphic design — if you’re talking about visual culture writ large, it’s increasingly difficult to define specific trends,” he added.
The reasons for this phenomenon of homogenised culture are manifold and widely discussed – from the flow of wealth and power to a select few in society, to algorithms and social media, to rampant accessibility of trends and visual cues via the internet.
Addressing the ongoing “aesthetic consolidation” is becoming urgent, especially since we have generative AI to contend with, raising fears and concerns amongst creative professionals and artists. Apple’s jarring advertisement showcasing objects of visual and creative culture being crushed by a giant iPad certainly did no favours for such anxieties.
It is obvious “near-total inertia” is happening in the arts and will have indelible consequences, if not already. In fact, visual and cultural stasis was evident in the art market before the pandemic – there is a reason “fairtigue” become such a popular term.
However, the art world’s power players seem condescendingly contented to focus on the frenetic hamster-in-the-wheel spinning of its annual calendar of international biennales, auctions, and art fairs. The ensuing post-pandemic relief of being able to travel and interact irl, followed by the hype of rising art capitals or new commercial ventures by mega businesses, helped to create the mirage of new and different.
Yet there are clear and present signs this illusion is not going to hold.
The New York Times art critic Jason Farago’s scathing review of the latest edition of Venice Biennale points to an art world in a state of stagnation. To start, there is the fact that the 130-year-old Venice Biennale is still considered “the world’s principal appointment to discover new art”, despite the existence of emerging and established art centres, biennales, and major exhibitions beyond the global north.
Last year, brand strategist Alex Murrell published a viral visual essay aptly titled The Age of Average, referencing a study by Indiana University researchers analysing color, layout, and style of 10,000 websites. The researchers observed, that since 2010, all the visual aspects online were becoming more and more similar. Murrell’s essay also noted that home interiors, urban architecture, cars, and product designs were increasingly looking alike.
A significant point made in the essay featured pictures of contemporary cities lined up next to each other, their visuals eerily similar in style, structure, and more. Would this also be the case if one were to line up a series of images of the Venice Biennale, alongside other biennales taking place this year, even in far-flung regions such as East Asia or the Gulf?
Perhaps, there is a lesson here for the rest of the world not to turn so eagerly to our Western counterparts, and instead pave our own diverse and myriad ways in the canon of art history.
After all, when one is inherently accustomed to cultural homogeneity, even in the most progressive seeming art scenes, anything that is different can become an immediate conflict, painfully dissonant to process, and inadvertently rendering open and honest communication ineffective. This can lead to toxic social encounters and workplace culture, or taken to its extreme, social fragmentation and breakdown in discourse regarding major crises and tragedies, be it wars, pandemics, climate change, or more.
We are already witnessing, in our very own lifetime, the ways and means lack of diversity in thought and action evolve into polarisation of thought and action, with highly fatal consequences.
If rupturing social fabric or humanitarian fallout is not sufficient cause for alarm for the more insular fractions of the art world, the economic ramifications of “cultural paralysis” may lend pause.
While conservative buying habits during a fiscally uncertain climate are likely, that does not imply every auction sale or art fair or exhibition looking the same is not going to cause some level of discontentment. Heightened disinterest may impede building a sustained relationship with new collectors or visitors. This could have serious business implications, given that fostering such relationships is art world currency.
Meanwhile, experts and policymakers believe a key solution to today’s increasingly bleak economy is to “avoid the lure of simple protectionist views” and continue expanding ties, even engaging in “connector economies” such as the likes of Mexico, Morocco, and Vietnam, acting as “links between superpower nations”, “arbitraging geopolitics for economic advantage”, “connecting the blocs” and imbuing some much-needed resilience into trade networks.
Perhaps if the art world were not so enraptured with maintaining its status quo and insularity, while engendering cultural stasis influenced by western lenses, it could adopt a similar approach – building authentic ties across diverse art scenes that would last beyond market and media hype. In doing so, hopefully, we can create the cultural and visual breakthroughs we so clearly need, to make sense of and maybe even help rebuild our civilisation in decline.
Cited By:
1. Paris-based veteran French art collector Sylvain Lévy in his editorial titled, “Art Basel in the Age of Average”, Linkledln, 9 June 2025.
2. German artist, filmmaker, writer Hito Steyerl in her publication titled, “Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat”, Verso Books, 10 June 2025.
3. Steyerl in her op-ed, “How Do You Get Artistic Freedom Back Into Art”, for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s newspaper of record, 2 March 2025.
4. Steyerl during a keynote speech delivered at the Goethe-Institut in Berlin on 30 January 2025. Reproduced as above mentioned op-ed.
5. American journalist Catilin Dewey in her popular digital culture newsletter Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends, 1 June 2024.
You can read the other non-commissioned (unpaid) essay in this series here.
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