Gregory Sholette

As artistic activism becomes a signature attribute of contemporary high culture, a wave of museum boycotts, protests, occupations and labour unrest marks our current decade. Meanwhile, much of the post-2008, post-Occupy art generation abhors the multi-billion-euro capitalist art market, even as the very term art is radically shifting, twisting, inverting, if not undergoing an outright self-expulsion from itself as it moves from its familiar white cube dwelling places to occupy the public sphere at an ever-accelerating tempo. But as art joins the everyday social world, its status as a privileged and critical realm that is set apart from the ubiquitous materialistic pursuits of a consumer society is likewise receding from view, and in truth, most high cultural practitioners have yet to really face this new, ‘bare’ art world and what it represents. Nevertheless, as art sheds its centuries-old ideological privilege of autonomy, it is gaining a front-row seat in the contentious struggle to rethink society, as well as the expressive, imaginative and artistic value is generated, for whom, why and to what ends. Still, the question lingers, how will art, especially activist and anti-capitalist art, remain critically radical once fully submerged in a world of lolcats, doomsday preppers and xenophobic frog memes?