Galleries, biennales, residencies, grants—this holy quadrinity of contemporary art pretends to be the engine of culture while functioning more like a customs checkpoint for the imagination, where every artwork must declare its ideological cargo, its thematic allegiance, and its social utility before being allowed entry; the gallery wants art that photographs well and offends no collectors, the biennale wants art that sounds global while saying nothing eternal, the residency wants artists who can perform curiosity on schedule, and grant culture wants neatly packaged trauma, digestible politics, and a mission statement longer than the artwork itself, all of them united by a single fear: transcendence without explanation; because the moment art stops being legible, topical, and obedient—when it stops commenting on the present and starts rupturing it—it becomes unmanageable, un-curatable, unsellable, and therefore invisible to institutions addicted to relevance, addicted to frameworks, addicted to the comforting lie that art exists to illustrate discourse rather than summon the ineffable; what we are left with is an endless parade of polite provocation, sanitized dissent, and conceptual noise that ages faster than the funding cycles that birthed it, while true art—the kind that invokes myth, cosmos, terror, ecstasy, and the divine—remains exiled, not because it lacks depth, but because it refuses to beg for approval from systems that confuse administration for vision and permanence for a risk they can’t afford.
