Lip-Synching the Revolution

Fighting about art and identity, again.

By Bradley WesterMarch 11, 2026

• Art & Architecture

DEAN KISSICK’S DECEMBER 2024 Harper’s Magazine cover story “The Painted Protest” argues that contemporary art, particularly that seen in recent large-scale blockbuster exhibitions and biennials, is more concerned with virtue signaling than with challenging aesthetic boundaries. While the essay takes its title from Tom Wolfe’s 1975 book The Painted Word, a similarly scathing critique of the art of its time (which was also excerpted in Harper’s), the connection, for me, feels strained. A more revealing comparison is with Arlene Croce’s controversial 1994 essay “Discussing the Undiscussable,” published 30 years to the month prior in The New Yorker. Both Croce’s and Kissick’s essays interrogate the uneasy space where art, politics, and criticism collide, and both provoked an intense backlash amid the heated culture wars.

Croce used the term “victim art” when she took aim at choreographer Bill T. Jones’s powerful performance Still/Here (1994), which featured heartfelt testimonials from terminal AIDS patients videotaped and projected onstage. Several were dead by the time of the performance. Croce refused to review, or even attend, the performance of what she took to be critically bulletproof art. “By working dying people into his act,” she wrote, “Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism.” Three decades later, Kissick decries, in exhibitions like the 2024 Barbican show Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art and the 60th Venice Biennale’s Foreigners Everywhere, a brand of institutionalized political art that is too comfortable and predictable: “Artists have gone from trying to destroy reality, as in the days of the Dadaists, to attempting to reassert it and restore order today.”

Written in vastly different cultural moments, three decades apart, Croce and Kissick voice similar anxieties about the limits of genuine critical discourse when art is entangled in politics and identity. These two provocative essays scrutinize the tension between aesthetic freedom and political urgency. They confront how identity, even when mobilized as a force for visibility and justice, can shield art from critique—transforming dissent into offense and rendering criticism suspect. Questioning the work risks being seen as questioning the identity. Having lived through both eras, I know how the moral imperative of representation, while once radical, now risks stifling the very discourse it was meant to enrich.

Croce foregrounded the critical bind Jones’s work put her in, and “Discussing the Undiscussable” landed like a detonation. Croce’s refusal to see Still/Here, combined with her blunt language (“victim art,” emotional “blackmail”), made her a lightning rod. It wasn’t just a noncritique of a dance; it was also perceived as a refusal to acknowledge suffering itself. In the background of all of this was a fierce debate around public funding for the arts and free speech. The 1989 controversy surrounding the NEA funding for Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment, which included homoerotic and BDSM photographs, inflamed a moral panic and galvanized right-wing politicians to seize on the artists’ modest public funding. In response to the uproar, the National Endowment for the Arts added a “decency clause,” which was used a year later to block funding for performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, whose work addressed sexuality, queer identity, and political critique. Although in 1993 the “NEA Four” won their lawsuit that restored their grant money, the NEA soon after ended all individual artist grants. “Discussing the Undiscussable” was perceived by some as part of the same conservative assault.

Kissick’s 2024 essay—with its wry tone, less confrontational than Croce’s—entered a landscape already saturated with discourse about identity, virtue signaling, and the politicization of aesthetics, and at a moment of widespread backlash against perceived “wokeness.” I share some of Kissick’s grievances and saw several of the exhibitions he references. In my own review of the 60th Venice Biennale, I argued that even the best-intentioned DEI efforts can cause harm. By titling his exhibition Foreigners Everywhere, focusing on artists of the Global South, and highlighting refugee, immigrant, self-taught, “outsider,” Indigenous, and queer artists, Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa ultimately undermined his curatorial aims. Surely people from the Global South don’t see themselves as foreign or strange; nor, I can attest, do queer people. And Indigenous peoples—the ab-originals—can never rightly be called foreign. Pedrosa’s intention, in part, was to draw the Global South into the Western canon. But by virtue of his title, he positioned the entire exhibition as an exotic spectacle for the Global North’s gaze. The moral imperative of his inclusionary framework made many sympathetic to the work on view, despite a traditionalist emphasis on craft and narrative technique. In the end, Foreigners Everywhere reinforced colonial perspectives rather than upending them.

Around the time of Kissick’s article, I saw the exhibit Xican-a.o.x. Body at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which featured “the work of artists identifying as Mexican American, Chicana/o, Xicanx, Indigenous, Latinx, Black, Brown, and Queer.” I hardly remember the work since the wall texts explained the mystery and pleasure out of almost everything. I felt lectured to and was afraid there’d be an exit exam. Its “curatorial framework” drew on “the Brown Commons,” a term coined by theorist José Esteban Muñoz in his 2020 posthumous book The Sense of Brown to describe a shared political and aesthetic experience among those marked and othered by normative whiteness. One could publish a weighty coffee-table book on the number of shows based on Muñoz’s work, especially his groundbreaking Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, published in 2009. I’m someone whose work is deeply informed by Muñoz’s thinking, and yet the chronic referencing, even romanticizing, of his writing among the international curatoriat would seem to prove Kissick’s claim that DEI has been institutionalized in the art world.

As a queer visual artist and writer who’s been navigating, and sometimes fighting, the shifting terrain of these debates for decades, I’ve seen firsthand how the authentic political impulse in art can be constrained by institutional expectations, good intentions notwithstanding. I’m all for diversity, equity, and inclusion, having worked to that end for my and other marginalized communities since the beginning. But today, the balance has shifted. Artists used to be ahead of the curve, providing inspiration and voice to sentinel curators and institutions. Over a short time, DEI, which began as a necessary correction, has come to mediate art’s relationship to politics for us. Presently, it feels like curators and institutions are writing the scripts, if not putting words in our mouths. I’m guilty of a bit of lip-synching myself to get grants and residencies. In recent years, state arts councils have centered minority status in their grant application examples. I’ve had students—heterosexual students—play up their proximity to queerness and even co-opt its language in their artist statements and résumés. Museum wall texts all too often tell us precisely what to think in politically correct language. We arrive at these large exhibitions already in agreement, compliant, expecting our political values to be reflected and confirmed, not challenged or outraged.

Kissick, who is 42, romanticizes the New York art scene of his beginnings because, I suppose, we all do. But the early aughts? Please. I moved to the city in 1978 and inhabited what soon became the legendary East Village eighties scene, when I created some of the earliest performances about gender nonconformity, long before DEI was a thing. These experiences shaped me into an adult artist. The perilous realities of that era—a filthy, cheap, nearly bankrupt city so dangerous I almost didn’t survive (I count three near-death experiences); the reign of Ronald Reagan; the rise of neoliberalism; plus the dawning of the AIDS epidemic—all keep my nostalgia in check. Nevertheless, that risk-inclined period, with its pure and unadulterated rage and grassroots activism, may have been the last stand of the avant-garde in the United States—political urgency and complete aesthetic freedom!

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Our freedom in the late 1970s and early ’80s wasn’t something hard‑won; we were simply a community of creative misfits from everywhere, living cheaply and doing whatever we pleased, because no one knew we existed, and nobody cared. Out of that, art arose organically, from just being ourselves. By 1980, I was curating a performance night at Inroads, a small ground-floor space on Mercer Street in SoHo. One day, a woman with a Scottish accent walked in and said she was a performance artist in an all-girl punk band, DISBAND, and that she’d overstayed her visa, so she was working as a go-go dancer in New Jersey for cash. She wanted to create her first iteration of “Go-Go Girls Seize Control,” in which she and her colleagues would perform their striptease routines while revealing their motivations, stories, and opinions about the men for whom they danced. No one had seen anything like it. Diane Torr became both hero and scapegoat in the feminist wars she helped ignite when figures like Andrea Dworkin were condemning sex work. We became friends, looked a bit alike, and recognized our shared deployment of the power and risk of androgyny—we both had straight and gay lovers of both sexes.

One day, Diane mentioned a women’s performance fundraiser for WOW (Women’s One World) at Club 57. This short-lived but influential punk-inspired club helped launch the careers of many East Village denizens—Ann Magnuson, John Sex, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, RuPaul, and others. I wanted to join, but Diane said I couldn’t because I was a man. So, on a whim, I dressed in her clothes, enlisting the help of her sexy then-boyfriend, who happened to live next door, to see if I could pass. Both of us were aroused by how “Diane” I had become. He walked me, arm‑in‑arm, to the club. I got past the door‑lesbian, then pushed through the crowd until I found Diane. After a confused “I … know you!” she howled with laughter and, for the rest of the night, introduced me as her best girlfriend—her feminist lesbian friends’ smiles waning into ferment when my sex was revealed.

That single act deeply impacted the later work of both of us.

About a year later, in 1982, Diane and I collaborated on Arousing Reconstructions at St. Mark’s Danspace. The performance began with each of us impersonating the other—our resemblance surprising even our friends. As it progressed, we became ourselves, but not before meeting in the middle, near naked, in some primal, pre-gendered state. It was Diane’s first time doing drag, something she would later become known for: drag king performances and workshops teaching women to pass as men in public. I, too, continued transforming—man into woman and back again, lingering in that middle space, what we now call nonbinary. Pieces like Re:Gender (Men in Armor) and Re:Gender (Scape) followed at Inroads, the New Jersey State Museum, and the Kitchen in New York City.

We were part of a constellation of artists who saw identity as lived critique—long before institutions codified it, before terms like nonbinary, gender nonconforming, transgender, gender-fluid, genderqueer, and cisgender had entered common usage. At New York venues like the Mudd Club, 8BC, the Kitchen, Franklin Furnace, Dixon Place, the Pyramid Club, Save the Robots, ABC No Rio, and Limbo Lounge, we weren’t navigating DEI frameworks; we were building audiences, aesthetics, and politics from the ground up. Before curatorial categories were shaped by such diversity frameworks, the early 1980s East Village performance scene was about survival, rebellion, and becoming.

Then the AIDS crisis changed everything. With survival in doubt, freedom would be hard-won, if at all. At the crisis’s mid-eighties height, artists in particular began to mobilize. Avram Finkelstein, Jorge Socarrás, Chris Lione, Charles Kreloff, Oliver Johnston, and Brian Howard formed the SILENCE=DEATH collective, designing the now‑iconic poster brandishing those words with the image of a pink triangle like the one used by the Nazis to mark homosexuals. The poster was later adopted by ACT UP—with chapters springing up in major cities across the globe—and Finkelstein went on to co-found Gran Fury, an art collective that turned queer grief and rage into graphic resistance, pushing urgent messages into the streets, subways, and museum windows. Their work was smart, fast, visceral, embodied, and in-your-face. It hijacked the visual language of advertising and turned it against the state, the church, the FDA, the CDC, and the media.

Alongside them, artists like David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Félix González‑Torres, Zoe Leonard, and Nan Goldin forged an aesthetic of queer resistance grounded in lived experience—mourning, intimacy, state violence, and survival. Their art wasn’t symbolic; it was made in bedrooms, hospital wards, protests, and punk clubs, rooted in DIY networks. This was political art made by the dying and the furious, not curated into safe critique but detonated across public space. At the time, survival was our identity.

As Reaganomics fueled a very different vision of freedom, that of the market, the late 1980s and early ’90s saw an art-star machine kick into hyperdrive. In the face of the dominant conservative politics of the era, arts institutions seized on the vitality of creative work that entailed political dissent, and some of these queer artists came to prominence. Those dealing directly with AIDS would become unassailable. Enter one such artist, Bill T. Jones, and the critic Arlene Croce.

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Like Kissick, I have seen few recent biennials that were, in his words, “a space of spectacle and innovation, where artists tried out wildly different mediums and entertained radical ideas about what art could do and why.” What is needed is more art that does and less art that says. To critique an art world that privileges identity is to critique an emphasis on contingency or context over autonomy. Too often, we encounter work that relies on institutional scaffolding to be legible. Without the insider knowledge—the queer or racial backstory, or the context of colonial seizure or capitalist extraction—we might take a work for just another competent (or mediocre) abstract or figurative painting, textile, photograph, or installation of objects. Narrative and biography can prop up work that wouldn’t otherwise hold its own, especially when its formal language is borrowed from innovative work that came before. This is made apparent when we see these two kinds of work side-by-side or in proximity at a museum. For an art-world outsider especially, art becomes even more confusing, indecipherable, a chore.

One of the many objections to Kissick’s article was his totalizing critique, which may accurately capture some of the world’s most prominent exhibitions but only a relatively small portion of the broader art world—an ecosystem enlarged by previously excluded groups thanks to the DEI protocols he questions. Another objection was his omission of countless great works of political art by living artists who don’t simply reflect the moment but help shape it, artists who refuse to fall in line: Kara Walker, Ai Weiwei, Theaster Gates, Hito Steyerl, and Arthur Jafa, to name a few.

I’m reminded of artists in history who negotiated both contingency and autonomy— Francisco Goya, Jacques-Louis David, Diego Rivera, Hélio Oiticica. Or Bertolt Brecht, whose work was consumed with the notion of doing over saying. His formal autonomy was revolutionary for modern theater. Brecht’s theater of alienation disrupted narrative illusion, preventing the audience from emotionally identifying with the characters, forcing them instead to think. He wanted them to laugh when his actors cried and to cry when the characters laughed, so they could see clearly the play’s social and political machinery—a perception that might give rise to political action. For Brecht, art was not meant to affirm one’s beliefs but to unsettle them, and to remain open to interpretation and critique, resisting both emotional coercion and institutional control.

I’ll never forget a dinner I was fortunate to attend with the great poet and dance critic Edwin Denby. Barely out of grad school, I fell into performing in a Robert Wilson production at Lincoln Center. “What do you think of Wilson’s work?” Denby asked. “Well, I don’t actually know,” I answered. “I’ve never seen his work before being in one.”

“The first piece of his I saw was Deafman Glance,” Denby continued. “I hated it. I was going to walk out, but something made me stay longer. Suddenly, I realized I loved it, not because it affirmed my established tastes but because it changed them. It changed me.”

Leave it to a poet to reveal what makes art art. Even with my young instincts, it rang true. I’ve never been interested in an art that stands in for something else. I want the thing itself. Denby’s story is a brilliant illustration of what art can do—move us, not in the sympathetic sense but in the deepest sense of being changed by it. 

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Featured image: Bradley Wester & Diane Torr, Arousing Reconstructions, St. Mark’s Danspace, 1982. Photo: Mariette Pathy Allen.