Yesterday evening I attended an exhibition opening titled “Happiness for you and your family”. It was a show about the problems of immigration and deportation and tried to showcase the issues of inequality among people in our region.

While the cause is surely a valiant one, the whole execution of the message was far from it and the issue lays not with the message, but the context in which it was presented — the gallery.

Galleries today, at least the mid and higher tier ones, serve one purpose and one purpose alone: To provide a meet-up spot for society’s middle and upper class, where social status is exchanged and hierarchical dominance is enforced by the subtle and non-aggressive means of buying overpriced art.

If in the lowest of classes the status of each individual is determined by more or less brute force, here the deciding factors are much more sophisticated: Do we know the artist? Do we know the gallery owner and head curator? Do they know us and are we an individual that may even buy some work?

In the end it all comes down to status and the exhibition itself only serves as a conversation piece — an ice breaker that gives those who attend an easier time to get their conversations going. But the important bit is what all this means for the exhibition itself, because if we’re sincere, it matters little what art is being shown, the main part of the event is that people who matter show up.

This of course undermines any real narrative the artist or their work might wish to propagate amongst the gallery visitors and while aesthetic art doesn’t really seem to mind being used in such a way, political and critical art lose their power almost completely.

Truth be told, the context of a gallery space itself diminishes the power of any critical message anyway, because as soon as such a message is uttered inside the confines of a white cube, its validity is judged by the merits of aesthetics, not only the truthfulness of its claim.

In the old days, where social media and crowd funding didn’t exist, art surely was one of the better ways to spread ones message into the world. Considering the problems any individual could have found themselves in by critiquing the quality of their ruler or the decisions of their state (socialist and communist countries especially), art gave them the ability to hide their true message inside a seemingly innocent and aesthetically well built package — like Thomas More’s Utopia for example.

Now, with political Twitter wars and shameless news outings, I think we can agree such times have passed — at least for most of us living in the western world — and as such I think it is time to start thinking about a new medium of expression, when political and critical issues are concerned.

Art might just become more and more a tool guided by the merit of aesthetics, and lose its critical influence over time — at least compared to how it was used throughout history. And I even believe this might be a good thing, because we as a society have created immensely better ways to spread awareness around socio-political issues, as we saw yesterday when most of the world stood together and protested the issues of climate change. 

We just have to acknowledge the fact that a pretty picture or a complex conceptual installation would’ve never have had the same effect.