Christophe Kihm questions art's demand for relevance

In an artpress essay, critic Christophe Kihm challenges the contemporary expectation that art must be 'pertinent'—i.e., responsive to social or political issues. He uses the 55th Venice Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni under the title 'Il Palazzo Enciclopedico,' as a case study. Kihm notes the apparent paradox of awarding the Golden Lion to Tino Sehgal, a post-conceptual artist who produces no physical images, while also featuring numerous outsider or art brut artists. He argues that Gioni's justification—resistance to the 'pollution of images'—reveals a shift from aesthetic to ethical criteria. Kihm traces this shift to the end of the avant-gardes around the 1980s, when art lost its minority position and entered an 'age of consensus.' Now, artists are evaluated not for formal innovation but for their ethical stance, measured by 'pertinence' and 'positioning.' This ethical regime, Kihm contends, replaces aesthetic debate with ideological conformity, producing a 'politically correct' discourse that separates legitimate from illegitimate art. He references Jacques Rancière's 'Malaise dans l'esthétique' to describe how art's link to utopia and collective transformation has been severed. The essay concludes that the current consensus prevents genuine debate and reduces art to symptomology.