The Paradox of Contemporary Art: A Violent World, Yet Works Are Correct and Harmless

Christian Caliandro critiques the growing dissociation between contemporary art and reality, arguing that as global violence and political chaos escalate, art has retreated into moral correctness and inoffensiveness. He cites artist Theo Eshetu, who notes that pervasive violence has shifted our reference points, and musician Trent Reznor, who compares the collective sense of disconnection in the US to someone secretly moving furniture at night. Caliandro observes that over the past fifteen years, artworks have been judged primarily by their moral and identity pedigree, with curators acting as moral legitimizers, controllers, and even censors. This demand for correctness emerged precisely as history, politics, and geopolitics spun out of control. The paradox is that while the world became more brutal, art was expected to be perfectly controlled, polite, and harmless—contradicting art's traditional role of being provocatively 'out of register.' Caliandro sees this as a compensatory mechanism leading to a major short-circuit: as collective agency over facts and choices was lost, art and culture were forced to follow rigid protocols under threat of exclusion. He points to the Venice Biennale as a convergence point where art, politics, geopolitics, and representation collapse into each other, warning that art's retreat into a consolatory spectacle of correctness risks renouncing its transformative identity.