The Highest Form of Kitsch: “Political” Message Art
The museum director, gallerist, curator, and critic are elites of the professional class. Increasingly, so is the successful artist, with the art degree now a critical credential for success and recognition in this segment of the culture industry. Art world elites navigate a world of members only airport lounges, art fairs, galas, openings, and lavish private dinners. With their fluid and stylish self-presentations and identities, they have directed the contemporary global art world to adhere to a distinctly American ideal of liberalism and pseudoprogressive politics, protestations from Global South elites notwithstanding. American identitarian hegemony, the soft face of Empire, has produced the highest form of kitsch, promoted and desired by philanthropists and collectors and imposed on the rest of us. We need to unpack this condition if we are to challenge this pervasive form of debased art and its ideological outgrowths.
Exclusive to the Magazine
The Highest Form of Kitsch: “Political” Message Art by Catherine Liu is featured in full in Issue 3 of Memo magazine.
Get your hands on the print edition through our online shop or save up to 20% and get free domestic shipping with a subscription.
Related
The APY Art Centre Collective scandal, ignited by Murdoch’s The Australian, exposed more than allegations of interference—it revealed power struggles in the Aboriginal art industry and became a flashpoint for culture wars. As institutions, dealers, and politicians jockeyed for position, the artists were caught in a battle over authenticity, control, and the future of Aboriginal contemporary art.
Monash University’s indefinite postponement this week of an exhibition featuring Khaled Sabsabi signals a deepening crisis in Australia’s cultural institutions. In the wake of Creative Australia’s Venice Biennale reversal, we are witnessing a damaging institutional retreat from risk—where the language of care and consultation masks a quiet erosion of artistic and academic freedom.
Anna Higgins’s work operates within a cinematic, layered logic of montage—an intricate interplay of history, memory, and materiality.
