Sebastian Calfuqueo’s “Tray Tray Ko” is a six-minute film depicting the artist dragging an electric blue fabric through their native Mapuche land and into a waterfall. Why is this video worthy of an audience’s attention?
By “highlighting the interconnectedness of her own personhood and the landscape [Calfuqueo] resists the Chilean government’s efforts to destroy Indigenous homelands for commercial use,” according to the 2024 Whitney Biennial, the longest-running survey of American contemporary art.
I cannot see how this work does any of these things.
Identity art derives its value from the artist’s identity rather than the quality of their work. This model, increasingly prevalent since the 2016 election, posits that displaying a marginalized individual’s work is a radical act of resistance against the predominantly white male spaces of art.
While that concern is legitimate, the identitarian lens rebukes the fundamental pursuit of art — communication with the viewer — and reduces diversity by generalizing individual experiences under group identity. In prioritizing identity over dialogue, contemporary art risks losing what makes it compelling.
In the widely-read essay “The Painted Protest,” critic Dean Kissick argues that in prioritizing representation, contemporary art has sacrificed quality for identity. “If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant; when the self is more important than the expression, true culture becomes impossible,” Kissick writes.
Great art is not only about the artist. It’s about you too.
Great art implicates you, the viewer, in the artist’s vision. Identity art has little interest in second-person dialogue; instead, it centers on the self or a generalized community. It erodes the primacy of physical form in mediating meaning between the viewer and the artist’s idea. Without this communication, the viewer cannot find meaning from the physical piece alone, and the art itself becomes superfluous.
Simone Leigh, a Black feminist sculptor, isolates the viewer from her ideas. At the 2019 Whitney Biennial, progressive protestors criticized her for prioritizing “inclusion, representation, and discussion” over “real politics.” Leigh shot back with a list of references that situated her work’s radicalism. Without an understanding of those references, Leigh argued, the viewer could not grasp its meaning.
Unfortunately, Leigh’s profound rumination on her identity is not reflected in its physical manifestation. At her LACMA exhibition, I struggled to connect the convoluted wall text to the art itself. Her work, devoid of this connection, feels politically empty — let alone radical.
By comparison, Arthur Jafa’s short film “Love is the Message, the Message is Death” shattered me with the intimacy of its universality. Jafa stitches together clips that show the centrality of Black ingenuity to American culture, interspersed with harrowing scenes of the violence the U.S. has inflicted on Black Americans. A woman confronts the viewer and asserts, “We are not aliens.”
Understanding Jafa’s piece doesn’t require you to share his identity. It requires your humanity. To quote artist Steve Locke, what you need to do is “open your fucking heart.”
Aside from de-emphasizing the primacy of form, identity art flattens interpretation.
The movement of identity art reels in contemporary art’s expansive intellectual approach in favor of a central narrative: A person’s identity shapes their art. This centripetal pull demeans minority artists by rendering them interchangeable.
Laughably, the main pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennial unwittingly exposed this contradiction by homogenizing its four distinct thematic subjects, “the queer artist; the outsider artist; the folk artist; the indigenous artist,” under the umbrella term “foreigner.”
Art historian Darby English speaks of the shocking conclusion of this forced generalization: “If all Black artists do the same thing, then why should anyone take a given Black artist more seriously than they take an Advil?”
Artillery Magazine’s review of Aria Dean’s recent exhibition exemplifies this issue. The critic ignores Dean’s explicit request to focus on her piece’s form and instead interprets Dean’s omission of her Blackness as a commentary on race— encouraging viewers to only engage with Black artists through the lens of their Blackness.
Because identitarian art derives its value by linking itself to a marginalized group’s history, it seems every show interrogates the past. Sean Monahan, founder of trend forecaster K-HOLE, describes the avant-garde as a shark: it dies when it stops moving forward. By going backward, identity art might have killed it.
The Hammer Museum’s “Now Dig This!” rejected the patronizing identitarian approach of wealthy museums that treat inclusion as an act of generosity. It instead declared that the margins are the center. That astonishing spatial inversion topples the conventional subculture versus culture dichotomy.
I’ve seen most 5C media studies and studio art shows travel down the worn identitarian path. I challenge 5C students to change it up. Present an unexplored vision, not one that affirms leftist postcolonial theory that we all already agree with. Start difficult discussions instead of broadening consensus. Reject generalization no matter its intent. Only then can we create something truly radical.
Elias Diwan PO ’25 is from D.C. He encourages you to please visit contemporary art shows. He is still uncertain of how to pronounce his own name (suggestions welcomed).
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