Is contemporary art’s recent moral tide just a ‘moment’?

It’s not always easy to identify the prevailing trends in contemporary art: since the coexistence of Pop and Minimalism in the ‘60s and the subsequent advent of pluralism, art has tended to constitute a jostle of conflicting aesthetic and critical positions, the picture varying according to standpoint and taste. Of late, though, the landscape has seemed quite legible. If you’ve been visiting biennales or institutions and a fair swathe of forward-thinking commercial galleries, the art there is increasingly predicated on giving voice to the formerly underrepresented or trying to right former wrongs. Hence, to take a few recent examples, a Venice Biennale composed of 90 percent women artists, a Documenta full of collectives new to even seasoned Western art-watchers – and evidence, via the media shitstorm, of the pitfalls of decentralised curating – and museum shows that, when they do spotlight dead white males (Hogarth at Tate Britain, for example, or German ‘colonial’ modernists at Berlin’s Neuenationalgalerie), seek to pre-emptively point out said artists’ moral failings before the hanging jury of Twitter can do so. Also, and relatedly, living white male artists complaining, three beers in and off the record, that they’ll never get another show.

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