Why Western art is (probably) finished

For centuries, it represented the apex of civilisation. Today, our admiration has been replaced by shame

Not long ago, I found myself in a castle outside Turin, preparing to interview Mike Winkelmann, the artist known as Beeple. A year earlier, a digital collage by Beeple – consisting of thousands of miniature pictures of, for instance, Kim Jong-un in lingerie, and Jeff Bezos as an octopus – had sold at auction for $69 million (£53 million). For believers in fine art, this was a baffling price to pay for a Jpeg. Now, Beeple was participating in an exhibition at Castello di Rivoli, the prestigious contemporary art museum.
Aside, though, from discovering that, in person, Beeple was curiously scratchy, the most memor­able aspect of my trip was a discussion with the museum’s director at the time, the influential Italian-American curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who had decided to show Beeple along­­side Francis Bacon, as if equals.
In the art world, Christov-­Bakargiev is a sibyl-like figure, renowned for her irrepressible intellect. That afternoon in Piedmont, she spoke about an unsettling idea: that we’re now witnessing the end of Western art. “After glo­bal­isation,” she said, her eyes twinkling as she warmed to her theme, “there are pressures on the existence and survival of this Western thing called art… And I don’t care if it exists or not.”
Are we really witnessing the death of Western art? If so, should we mourn it? Clearly, we’re not talking about the physical paintings we encounter in museums by, say, Raphael, Rubens, or Rembrandt. Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520) – that tumult of pagan frolicking, as the ancient god of wine leaps from his chariot towards the Cretan princess – isn’t, I hope, about to be defenestrated from the National Gallery. The success of last year’s Vermeer exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum confirms that pictures by Old Masters will continue to entrance us for centuries.
But the notion of Western art as conceived by Enlightenment thinkers – that grand tradition built upon classical Greek and Roman foundations – is being contested, sometimes vigorously. “The word ‘art’ hasn’t existed forever,” Christov-Bakargiev explains now, speaking to me from her country house south of Rome. “It’s not like someone 25,000 years ago in a cave is saying, ‘I’m making art.’ ‘Art’ is born with Western art history.”
There has been a “backlash”, Christov-Bakargiev says – and, thanks to digital technology, we are experiencing “the beginning of something which makes everything crack”.
The “pressures”, she believes, are coming from artists whose ancestors had nothing to do with the Western canon, as well as digital artists such as Beeple; both are ­circumventing Western art’s trad­itional “gatekeepers” (curators, critics, gallerists). Once, everyone (in Europe, at least) believed that Western art represented the apex of human civilisation. In today’s globalised world, that assumption is being stress-tested as never before.
Recently, in this country, exhibitions ostensibly honouring “greats” such as William Hogarth and Auguste Rodin have taken their subjects to task. In 2021, at Tate Modern, the latter was castigated for “destroying” an ancient vessel thanks to his habit of incorporating antiques into his sculptures, as well as taking advantage of the “starkly unequal” relationship between himself and his models. When Tate Britain rehung its permanent collection last spring, it seemed embarrassed by, and even cross about, much of the art in its care for being implicated in imperialism – such as its glittering 18th-century portraits by the likes of Thomas Gainsborough. Today, icons of Western culture have become figures of fun – as we witnessed recently, during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, when Leonardo da ­Vinci’s mural The Last Supper (1495-98) was parodied.
In a populist age that mistrusts experts and elitism, old certainties about Western art no longer apply. Even enthusing about it is now seen by some as démodé.
Sometimes, the prevailing anti-Western tendency can seem extreme. The prominent curator Adriano Pedrosa – who organised the main exhibition of this year’s Venice Biennale, titled Foreigners Everywhere, of which only a quarter of the 331 artists were from the West – doesn’t pull his punches.
“The discipline of art history, with its deeply European roots, frameworks, and models, is the most powerful and enduring apparatus of imperialism and colonis­ation,” he wrote recently. “The canonical masters and geniuses were invariably white, male, educated, and European.” The “challenge”, he continued, is “to question the primacy of the canon”. In other words, it’s time to stop genuflecting before the altar of Western art, and start looking to the Global South. At Venice, for the façade of the Central Pavilion, Pedrosa commissioned a vast, colourful mural, depicting a myth about ancients crossing between the Asian and American continents on the back of a crocodile, created by a group of indigenous artists from Brazil.
According to Pedrosa, it’s no longer tenable for any “museum” to be “an institution with a single monolithic, authoritarian voice”. This notion – that museums should be, to use the jargon, “polyphonic” – has been around for a while. Inspired, in part, by post-colonial theory, many curators have spent decades chafing against historical narratives that, they believe, shored up white male privilege.
One such figure was Frances Morris, the director of Tate Modern until last year. “As we approached the 21st century,” she told me recently, referring to the period when Tate Modern was being planned, “non-Western histories, as well as stories about outsider art and excluded artists including women, needed bringing into the institution.” By then, the work of black British artists was being increasingly recognised – such as Lubaina Himid, whose festive yet wistful paintings depicting black figures were shown at Tate Modern in 2021, four years after she’d won the Turner Prize. “The imperative,” Morris said, “was to diversify.”
Morris describes that shift as a “revolution” – but doesn’t agree that it has brought about the downfall of Western art. “We’re rewilding modernism,” she says. “I want to take modernism into the future, but see it through a different lens.”
Morris senses that “the roots of the next generation’s thinking are being born now”, and agrees with Christov-Bakargiev about the digital revolution: “In a world where everything is the same, on a screen, hierarchy is disappearing.”
But does this mean that things valued highly today – such as the oeuvre of Matisse – will, tomorrow, no longer be esteemed? “You can’t take the whole of the past into the future,” she replies. “Matisse will always be a great painter of his time. And maybe he will continue to have agency, but I don’t think you can legislate for that.”
She smiles. “Probably, my love is still with Agnes Martin,” she continues, referring to the 20th-century American abstract painter about whom she curated an exhibition at Tate Modern in 2015. “But the more I’ve become conversant in art from the Middle East or South Asia – or now East Asia, because I’m working in Korea – I’m captivated. It’s like learning another language… We all have a feeling of what’s good. But there are many goods. That’s what has really happened: there’s no one ‘good’ any longer.”