Art in a Multipolar World: Problem Analysis and Horizons

Over the last half-century, several assumptions have become widely accepted in the West, whether from a critical or celebratory perspective: the notion of liberal democracy as the only functional political form of a state; the expectation of the state to deliver progress (by whichever measurements); and the fact of relative economic prosperity in the West (regardless of periodic crisis). However, this alignment of views was not preordained; it was neither necessary nor inevitable for one or another component to fall into place. The same goes, it seems, for the precepts of global contemporary art, which has been described by much (Western) art theory as both a subject of this neoliberal alignment and a form for its discursive contestation.

Regarding the project of neoliberal globalization, nowadays the Washington Consensus is less accepted than it was twenty years ago. Deregulation, trade liberalization, and unfettered market growth are no longer taken as the only “rational” economic activity. Indeed, various other strategies have returned: industrialization, state intervention into ostensibly free markets, international trade policies, economic protectionism, and friendshoring (the practice of making economic agreements with international allies). This shift in the global political economy has been variously theorized in terms of “plurilateralism,” “heteropolarity,” “multiplexity,” or, in a phrase that synthesizes all the above, “deep pluralism,” in which wealth, power, and cultural and political authority are diffusely distributed rather than centralized in the hands of traditional actors like the state.1

This essay considers the function of art in this increasingly post-globalization, multipolar, and in some measure post-liberal world. Over the past three decades, the global art world has thrived thanks to the infrastructures of peak globalization; it has consequently internalized value systems that are embedded in the alignment between liberal democracy, the progressive state, and neoliberal metrics of economic stability. This alignment produces auxiliary notions in the art world that operate quite self-sufficiently—notions about certain artistic forms of production or distribution that embody liberal and progressive values in themselves, and about artistic “freedom” as a condition, rather than a product, of the system. The result is sanctimonious critique about anything from late capitalism to the pervasive political swing to the right across the planet. This critique fails to map onto actual state-society mechanisms, social structures, and political economic institutions, and often turn inwards towards institutions in the art world itself, limiting analysis to a circular logic. Thus, after decades of institutional critique in the arts, there seems to be a strange telos that leaves critical practitioners more or less in the same place where the critical project began: one that names rather than intervenes.2 Meanwhile, the object of critique is transforming; first and foremost, the very locus of neoliberal globalization is changing. While this doesn’t mean that neoliberalism is going away any time soon, it does have epistemological implications for those in antagonistic relations with neoliberalism in the arts. In the face of geopolitical fallouts such as the return of the Cold War in various guises, the shattering of the liberal progressive social contract, and rising claims to value pluralism, the survival of art’s exceptionalism depends on realism. Will the art world continue sleepwalking into the next existential crisis? Can art help produce experimental publics to address these lacunae? I define “experimental” in this context as something that understands and rearranges current structures rather than adding something ontologically new, and “publics” as people who make up most of society but who shy away from asserting their political existence, and whose positions are instead hallowed out by current political debates.

The Critique of Neoliberal Capitalism in Art Theory

Much art theoretical writing lacks system-oriented discussions about the geopolitical paradigm shift towards the neoliberal Washington Consensus and its ramifications for the production, reception, and circulation of contemporary art. That said, this text is neither a denial of nor apology for neoliberalism.3 It rather asks why critics of neoliberalism in the art sector insist on a near constant invocation of neoliberalism as a “great evil” when similar arguments are proffered by authoritarian, illiberal regimes, both economically and ideologically. What happens if it is no longer necessary to defend art against neoliberalism?

To inspect where art theory converges with scholarship on neoliberalism and the transformation of neoliberalism,4 it is important to realize the sometimes-nebulous connection between neoliberalism and liberalism, which, in a post-globalization era, is even less evident than it was before. Though it is true that the neoliberal takeover of the state by financialized capital disrupts the organization of the classical liberal small state, authoritarian state capitalism (sometimes) also represses private business and the liberal small state. Furthermore, the undermining of progressive neoliberalism in the West compels many to turn their gaze toward a more classical understanding of the state, i.e., that the function of the state is abstract and formal, serving to secure civic peace and not seeking ultimate truth, which suggests that the state should not be empowered with legalistic “rights.”5 There are, in contrast, places with state-led “neoliberal” development, like China, that not only uphold a promise of economic and, to some extent social, progress, but also actively attempt to redefine what fundamental concepts like democracy and freedom mean through illiberal practices. In other words, non-liberal state policy is not incommensurable with neoliberal economic policy. Some of these connections between neoliberalism and liberalism are historically construed under the sweeping ideology of globalization, such as the conflation of markets with political liberty, or markets with democracy, or the slippage between normative and positive conceptions regarding the most efficient economic system and the most just political system. However, underlying these conflations is a notion of freedom defined negatively (freedom from something), which should be balanced with positive freedom (freedom to do or be something).

In general, these nuances wither away in critical artistic production that addresses neoliberalism. There is a growing body of artworks and art theory that critique neoliberal market fundamentalism, market solutionism, and the exceptionalism of big corporations, and for good reasons.6 But why is art inclined to address certain aspects of our present woes more than others?

Many claims in the art world are complicit in creating an interpretative, rather than an explanatory, framework for assessing their object of critique. An interpretative framework demands a working concept as well as a coherent narrative about the phenomenon under scrutiny, even though the framework might only reveal certain dimensions of an issue that in fact has many causes. Due to its unfalsifiability—i.e., the inability to formulate an alternative hypothesis to prove or disprove the validity of the claim that is advanced—this framework presents the end rather than the start of a discussion.

The core of the explanatory framework is a comparison between similar cases, which compels one to identify why one explanation is better than another. Under these definitions of interpretive and explanatory frameworks, symbolic capital—Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological critique regarding artworkers’ specialized knowledge, which purportedly all cultural workers strive for7—is an interpretative framework. It stipulates the behavior of rational subjects who act within a given society, thus presupposing a model in which the behavior of the actors is formal and the structure of the society is empirical. It is insufficient as an explanatory framework because of its generalized treatment of capital as an independent variable, rather than a dependent variable constituting a composite indicator among other dimensions of explanation. While Marxian art theory seeks to establish a lucid framework for understanding the production of value in art as it relates to the production of value in capitalism, it often ends up eschewing the framework of the labor theory of value and affirming the exceptionality of art.8 Or more elegantly, but also more speculatively, it often aligns art with reproductive labor.9 The Marxian model assumes that the structure of society is formal—i.e., it has a fixed mode of production—while social actors are lively, empirical human beings, in that they are both rational and driven by emotion and tradition.10 An empirical critique of a formal model is ineffectual, just as a formal critique of an empirical model yields few insights. Rarely does art theory establish a model that combines empirical and formal understandings of, on the one hand, the social, political, and economic structures, and on the other, the actors within those structures.

Another ubiquitous argument in contemporary art theory concerns the similarity between the modalities of speculation in art and in financial capital.11 (In many of these arguments, the distinction between the traditional neoliberal logic of financialization and the general notion of speculative markets—markets that are not necessarily specific to neoliberalism—is glossed over.) Empirically, as Olav Velthuis notes, the relationship between the art market and speculation is conflicted, with many galleries and collectors actively trying to keep speculators out of the art circuit. Similarly, the average time that a collector keeps a work before selling it (which is longer than one would expect) suggests that artworks are not as liquid as commonly thought.12 This does not, however, refute the idea that contemporary art can aesthetically and philosophically reflect the logic and function of financial capitalism, a resemblance that often leads to cynical, careerist art(ists)—though this is not exclusive to contemporary art.13 Art is neither the harbinger nor the victim of neoliberalism, but simply its “fellow traveler.” Pinning the perpetual crisis of art and its relation to the social sphere solely on the “nefarious influence” of neoliberalism does little more than muddy the waters. Does this not universalize the “enemy” in ways that lead to a poorer, instrumentalized notion of art, or conversely, to an aestheticization of finance as the purest form of art? These kinds of critiques of art often feel misguided, or work at best as interpretations, whereas what is needed is a clear-headed engagement with the role of the state as a political form. The aspiration for progress and for related norms and values is being put on trial in the geopolitical sea change of post-globalization.

New Left and New Right Art

The notion of “deep pluralism” lends itself to a triad of analytical lenses—political, ideological, and economic—that I will use to assess phenomena in cultural production. A multipolar, pluralist understanding of the world scrambles the traditional left-to-right political spectrum, creating inconsistencies and contradictions. To give an example: the liberal thinker Qin Hui argues that while leftists in Western welfare states should oppose globalization, leftists in China should welcome it while simultaneously pushing for political reform, so that it can benefit the Chinese working class and the disadvantaged.14 But liberals are far from unitary. Lumping together diverse values and principles—individual freedom, private ownership, market logic, democracy, the civic sphere—into one doctrine often does a disservice to liberalism. Recently, several intellectuals in the Chinese pro-democracy and pro-market liberal camp have come out to idolize Donald Trump. Underlying this Trumpian turn is a complex combination of “neoliberal affinity” and a sense of “civilizational vindicativism” predicated on scientific racism, which makes some liberals receptive to Trump’s alt-right, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic ideology.15 The situation of the Chinese New Left is no less convoluted. What remains of its position when the state no longer needs to be defended against neoliberalism? Ironically, does the state itself become a meta-aesthetic rendering of “New Left art,” overshadowing Groys’s theorization of Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin?16 One can contrast this with contemporary Maoists singing red songs in choirs and wearing red scarfs.

In this context, I contend that the supposed alignment of artistic form and political ideology can only be stretched to its limit by looking through the broken mirror of post-globalization. In the better days of unipolar globalization, it was not incoherent or unfashionable in the West—and was perhaps even political—to borrow left or even “far left” aesthetics from a patently left country. However, when we shift contexts, these efforts begin to look incongruent and naive, especially when we consider what such New Left aesthetics mean for the home context where the New Left is oppressed or taken over by the state, or where there is an oscillation between these positions. To instantiate a “New Left art,” artists from former socialist countries, such as the Russia-based art collective Chto Delat, promulgated socialist aesthetics in Western, broadly leftist art circles. But this position was rendered unviable after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. For now it accomplishes little to distinguish a New Left position from a broad liberal anti-war alliance. (It’s hard not to notice the preponderance of anti-war art in galleries across the West.) The critique of neoliberal global hegemony—especially in the face of faltering internationalism, which was once crucial to progressive post-Soviet intellectuals—becomes problematic amidst the polarizing war in Ukraine. Shock from the war has shifted this critique towards a rather one-dimensional denunciation of “Russian fascism,” or towards calls “to decolonize Russia.” This one-dimensionality stems from the severe lack of interest in non-Western knowledge in the West, knowledge that could be useful for asking burning questions like: What drove the rise of the New Right? What are its aesthetic strategies?

Dopplereffekt, Gesamtkunstwerk, vinyl, 1999.

Moving away from the New Left, we enter the nebulous camps of progressivism and contemporary liberalism, where identity, cultural difference, and depoliticized notions of decolonial, local, and ancestral traditions are championed at the expense of genuine anti-colonial politics. The more globalization progresses, the more the same ready-made agendas are reproduced in the arts, such as “working situatedly on local issues/traditions.” More lurid details are added to our naval gazing, along with more piecemeal learnings from affable personalities (for example, “lessons I learned from my grandmother”). But these fall short as theoretical lenses for defining an agenda for art that is appropriate to our changing political context, partly because they focus on embodied experience. For those of us who come from a nationalist, non-Western context, the penchant for the local and the embodied is a worrying development. Most of us have experienced the better days of the two lefts and are now witnessing a course correction. Do we really want to see a premature de-intellectualization, after the premature deindustrialization of the Global South? And how does the push for a postmodern, post-individual community avoid lapsing back into a premodern, pre-individual community?

Finally we come to the New Right. In the West, many populist parties recognize what Antonio Gramsci identified as the cultural hegemony, or the “metapolitics,” of art and culture. They consequently support art because of its power to change perspectives and shape discourses. We can thus identify an emerging “New Right art,” which encompasses artistic positions that explicitly or implicitly aestheticize anti-liberal or anti-modern narratives. This art blurs the established opposition between, on the one hand, left-liberal, supposedly progressive, and (post-)modernist positions, and on the other, right-authoritarian, conservative, anti-modernists positions. In post-socialist Eastern European and Russian, it is astounding to witness how proponents of this anti-modern aesthetics indiscriminately borrow from traditionally progressive art movements such as 1960s nonconformism, 1980s conceptualism, and 1990s actionism. The result is a perplexing entanglement of contemporary art: a quasi “universalist” discourse that seeks to reintroduce traditionalist art and folklore into contemporary art institutions; the right-wing adoption of postmodern leftist artistic methods; and the emergence of artists who have an ambiguous fascination with techno-apocalyptic, crypto-fascist, and occult aesthetics, even as they proclaim themselves to be neither left nor right.17

Building on Deng Xiaoping’s political dictum about post-Mao reforms—“We must be vigilant against the right, but mainly against the left”—sociologist Zhao Dingxin articulates a fundamental principle of politics: political parties are more likely to be bound by politically correct discourse that is consistent with their original ideological orientation. Thus, a rightist party must guard against the right, a liberal party against liberalism, a religious party against fundamentalism, and a party with a strong nationalist orientation against nationalism.18 This not only gives descriptive clarity to the contours of new political alliances within a given society, but also prescribes what form of address could be effective. Today, negotiations, diplomacy, and compromises in the hope of discursive peacekeeping too often give way to polarized political debates and public opinion. The most pragmatic move may be to mobilize diverse intellectual resources to moderate the clash of opinions and to steer the center-right towards dealing with the extreme right. What if we saw politics as a form of practical reasoning rather than a form of demonstrative reasoning animated by fixed ideologies? Perhaps we should take seriously counterintuitive maneuvers like the recent proposal to marshal rightwing parties to advance the political integration of Europe.19

Postliberal Art in a Deeply Pluralist World

Those who find themselves in the middle of these tectonic geopolitical shifts tend to embrace mixed allegiances to various political ideologies. This is motivated as much by survival as by a deep engagement with political theory. Western scholars have proposed “post-liberalism” as an alternative beyond the binaries reproduced by governments—“liberal” vs. “illiberal,” “democratic” vs. “authoritarian.” Instead of continuing to adhere to the abstract, doctrinal, ideological claims of liberalism, some scholars argue that the only way through this contestability is via a form of pluralist “practical reasoning”—that is, a cooperative, dialogic, practice-based approach focused on sensitivity to local practices.20 The post-liberal approach focuses on understanding the coproduction of non-Western, non-liberal regimes by Western foreign policy and international regulatory frameworks, capturing the global networked character of authoritarian regimes as well as the inbuilt authoritarian and nationalist tendencies of capitalism in its global historical constitution.21 This approach presupposes analytical heterodoxy over theoretical orthodoxy, along with the essential contestability of notions such as “contemporary art,” “civil society,” and “autonomy” in the social sciences and humanities.

Guided by this, art can do more than reproduce the rhetorical and moral geographies of current affairs. It is nothing new for art and culture to become a political tool of states or of actors aligned with states. However, it is easier to critique the dubious role that state plays in art if one steers clear of one’s own position and identifies an external culprit, such as neoliberalism—whose complexity we’ve been trying to pin down—or, in the Cold War era, the CIA and the Soviet Union, both aggressive sponsors of art and culture.22 The moral equation is: denounce something as bad, and you render your own position good. But there is no way to understand the actual situation of non-Western, non-liberal places except through practical reasoning, which aims to work out what is meant by “liberal values” in art, “civil society,” and “artistic autonomy”—without the certainty of how these should look and function in a society.

Abstract Art Exhibition: Japan and U.S.A., held at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo in 1955.

Ultimately, there seems to be no coherent code of conduct when foreign liberals address state-sponsored responses to some of their political claims but not others. What is inconvenient for them to acknowledge is that many actors in art and knowledge production in postcolonial contexts do not want to or cannot fully detach their activity from the state, as proponents of radical decoloniality suggest they do, even if the state is authoritarian. As postcolonial academic Alima Bissenova writes,

We, well understanding all the shortcomings of the post-colonial state, nevertheless are an inseparable part of it through the universities, grants, involvement in the activities of other state-sponsored and state-controlled institutions. Many post-colonial actors come to the scene through the state and state-initiated projects.23

Meanwhile, the level of confidence and of autonomy from economic dependency that China has reached have moved it beyond mere historical recrimination. Chinese art scholars have formulated geo-specific epistemes such as “bentu” (native land) and have called for a “post-West” society, as in Shiming Gao’s writings accompanying the Third Guangzhou Triennial, titled “Farewell to Post-Colonialism.”24 Due to the hidden desire of the West to control the meanings of postcoloniality, much of this writing does not circulate in global art discourse. Down the road, we will need to reckon with the fundamental proposals about humanism that come from non-Western illiberal regimes.25

It might be too soon to declare that non-liberal countries are blanketly transforming their policies to emphasize specific cultural values or to enshrine a new telos for art production, one that embraces a multipolar world. What we do see is deep pluralism at play in state interactions with art. At the level of the state, there is an uneven distribution of power; sometimes rising political power is not matched by cultural power, and sometimes cultural power is built up to increase economic power. We also see deep pluralism in terms of tolerance for and recognition of other cultures with different state political forms. But is this pluralism consensual? In other words, do the main players in global society not only tolerate the material, cultural, and ideological differences of deep pluralism, but also respect and even value them as expressions of diversity?26 Critique of these programs in Western media, even though it might miss the mark, sometimes has an escalatory effect. While this critique has every right to be expressed, for critics who stop short of understanding, let alone living in, the complex realities they comment on, it fulfills a moral end while exempting itself from political consequences. We should not forget that “no scientific law can determine a moral end save by deserting the principle of the interdependence of means and end.”27

Could art move up the scale of complexity and offer a way of thinking through deep pluralism, rather than just being its complacent end product? This would require rigorously updating Raymond Williams’s “homologous structures” that mediate between the superstructure (New Right art, nation-building art, and their dynamic variations) and the base (multipolarity in the economic sphere), making room for more expansive rationales that present us with mixed allegiances. Could the uneasy overlaps of certain state forms and contemporary art be seen as a form of experimentation to develop more nuanced understandings of publics? Could art serve as a force for practical reason in the face of multiple moving targets? Could art accord itself a renewed role of cultural diplomacy precisely when all parties are too beholden to their own unipolar interests? Could art do this without becoming a bad copy of state functions? More tantalizingly, if this art does not resemble the form of art as we know it today, what might it look like? An aesthetics of the state? Covert diplomacy? Pop culture? A conjunction between tech and art? This is a call for art practitioners and critics to leave their comfort zones of critique, positionality, and value precepts.

Designing Institutions: Art After a Multipolar World

It is worth remembering the tremendous effort invested in pushing through the neoliberal globalization agenda, such as the global division of labor. Well into the 1970s, Western protectionism and economic nationalism reigned. The Carter and Reagan administrations exercised neoliberalism at home, but not free trade aboard.28 Furthermore, both neoliberal and non-neoliberal market actors needed states or superstate mechanisms to secure their interests. As Quinn Slobodian has documented, neoliberals sought solutions to the problem of order by moving vertically—shifting to higher scales of governance such as the League of Nations, international investment law, blueprints for supranational federations, systems of weighted franchise, European competition law, and ultimately the World Trade Organization.29

In the art world, the countermovements that emerged during these years are often invoked superficially. Yes, Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) are significant for recalling “actually existing” efforts towards decolonization and emancipation. But does showing artworks created in the 1960s and ’70s in the name of solidarity automatically grant them political efficacy today? Identification does not equal participation in concrete social movements—even less so through art and culture. On top of this, we need to see the anti-imperialist struggle of a bygone era as formal (based on a structural understanding of the world back then), and emotions provoked by social injustices today as empirical.

A draft Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, along with a draft Programme of Action that includes special measures for the benefit of countries most seriously affected by the economic crisis, were adopted by consensus in the Ad Hoc Committee of the Sixth Special Session of the General Assembly. A partial view of the meeting.: Photo: Teddy Chen, United Nations archive.

If the cultural production around Bandung in recent years has been a curatorial attempt to renew the lease of anti-imperialist and solidarity struggles, can it propose any ideas for how Bandung could have succeeded? In the absence of a viable counterfactual history, speculation becomes warranted.30 Beyond fanciful fabulations, we would be well-advised to produce multiple Bandungs—in other words, multiple interpretations of the movement, as should be done with any anti-hegemonic movement. For in each movement there are multiple variables that cannot be neatly unified under artistic representation. In terms of a movement’s relation to capitalism, we can discern competitive, reformist, and revolutionary approaches. In terms of its sphere of action, there are the economic and political spheres—but never purely the artistic sphere. Why not study the economic and developmental agenda of NAM and its engagement with existing international institutions? Why not reassess its economic policy proposals, such as the one to seek foreign direct investment for the “right to development” rather than dependency? What is the legacy of the New International Economic Order (NIEO)—an initiative of the Global South in the 1970s that called for the global redistribution of wealth, resources, and technology from developed to underdeveloped countries?31 It was in reaction to the NIEO that Hayekian reformers moved vertically and created the World Trade Organization in 1995.32 Such is the dialectic underneath the history, which we should examine for lessons for the present moment. If NAM drove a wedge between major powers during the Cold War, could it be credited with ending the Cold War and heralding the era of globalization? Or from another perspective, what could be today’s Bandung?

Surely one could identify heirs to this historical solidarity in contemporary grassroots, anti-globalization social movements across the world. In retrospect, peak anti-globalization coincided exactly with peak globalization, and thus much of its momentum was lost when some of its core demands and causes were taken up by states themselves. If we go by institutional design, which has seen NIEO as an “unfailure”33 that can help denaturalize the inegalitarian global political economy deemed to be the only viable path,34 then there is indeed a renewed engagement in the Global South with de-dollarization and a rethink of the IMF and World Bank.35 There is today, to update NAM for the present, a “multi-aligned” world.36

For art and culture institutions, this exercise of identify heirs to past struggles might urge them to align with these heirs in a brand of solidarity that transcends the dichotomy between political-economic doctrines and institutional boundaries. But this cannot be another general assembly, organizational chart, or self-smart contract design. This form of solidarity might only resemble “Bandung” prima facie, or not at all, before it starts mediating the ambitions of global art institutions, which are rooted in the diffused distribution of political, economic, and cultural power.

The multi-position I am trying to describe here may not be self-evident, and it will certainly face fastidious scrutiny from all sides: from the Western left for succumbing to authoritarian regimes and/or to capital, from the non-Western left for not being social enough, from the non-Western liberal left for not being liberal enough, from the domestic right for being too liberal, and so on. Often this position entails making an extra effort to maintain a liberal line when one is in the Global South, and a somewhat “statist” line when one is outside it. This multi-position is also in the long-term interests of those wanting a healthy society, since civil society needs the dialectic partner of the state. (When the state performs anti-politics, as the current German government has done, civil society is rendered redundant.) It thus makes sense to focus on building political power and state capacity in places like the traditional West, and on building civil society where state power is oversized. The convenient choice is often to revert to comfortable positions and succumb to the dominant discourses in a given social context. But this allows multipolarity to rear its ugliest face. One can be self-critical, skeptical (“have we ruled out all alternatives?”), and tactical, but one should not be cynical or intellectually resigned. The art world urgently needs to learn how to be unafraid of critique, espouse contradictions, and, crucially, not go for low-hanging fruit. This is a position we should invest in deeply.

Finally: What is art as a horizon of thinking after a multipolar world?

It is exactly in this multipolar and deeply pluralist world that art can take on the role of mediation (rather than reproduction or representation), if not the role of an ambassador. In a fractured but not yet fully segregated world, art can fill the communication gap, where there is no political incentives for such communication. By not reducing itself to the simple moral geography of good and bad, art can mediate perspectives and aspirations at individual, community, civil, and institutional levels—perspectives that may appear divergent but still share rational common ground. By being acutely aware of the stakes in trafficking in divergent viewpoints, art can tactically resort to its claim to autonomy, but not with condescending assertations that replace one truth with another, and not with self-heroism that undermines efforts at building institutions. The artful diplomatic skills of philosopher Alexander Kojève, who creating para-institutions that paved the way for the political experiment of the European Union, is a case in point, pace critique of his notion of colonialism.37 This requires an understanding of the inconsistency of means and ends that go into institution building. Art and culture can start with what binds a common humanity at all political levels, from the institutional—with processes like Conference of the Parties and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and perhaps with new institutions focused on issues like artificial intelligence and global finance—to the grassroots, where a place has been left vacant by the demise of the World Social Forum.38 Artistic strategies can undoubtedly take on the role of creative advocacy, the most notable example being artworks commissioned for the UN Climate Conferences, although these have been met with both public enthusiasm and incomprehension. Here the question seems to be whether art can have popular appeal and still be conceptually rigorous.39

Advancing this agenda requires setting aside value differences, but it would be too exacting to define a teleological happy ending, i.e., a common denominator that holds everything together, a (post-)humanistic moral sentiment that is at once too abstract and too concrete. Perhaps we should not be talking about aligning values at all but about instrumental relationships between different systems. We need a clearheaded picture of the planetary arising not from naive escapism from multipolarity, but from the frictions caused by post-globalization multipolarity. Beyond the institutional edifice of the UN, there is perhaps more room for artistic thinking to serve as a force of reason in the face of multiple moving targets, be they value systems, geopolitical contexts, or hitherto unthought-of technologies and techniques of social ordering.

For example, as much as the tech space is splitting into hemispheric stacks in the image of contested multipolarity, it is thinkable, and historically demonstrable, for top scientists from different blocks talk to and agree with one another on fundamental questions. Given value pluralism, how can art propose alternatives to “AI Super Alignment,” the proposal that superintelligent AI systems should act in ways that align with human values and intentions? Can art contribute to discussions about data in a way that shifts the focus away from the obsession with personal-preference data, which is in any case valueless when unaggregated? When the talk of the town is AI regulations and redlines, can art invigorate a discussion on AI greenlines—on what work AI should be doing?40

The natural sciences are reaching a “wall of complexity” because new sensing and sequencing technologies are providing access to ever more granular data. The multidimensionality of data makes it increasingly difficult to answer questions like: What causes cancer?41 It is not only that some things in the life and earth sciences are fundamentally unknowable; previously unthought connections have also come to the surface—e.g., large language models have been used to predict patterns in DNA fragmentation and the bio-semiotics of animal language.42 With the rise of political populism, the communication of the latest scientific and technological developments to the broader public must avoid undermining scientific rationality and objectivity. Cultural institutions can step in as a crucial mediator in this process of public reasoning.

Games and sci-fi can help model future societies, but the question is how these models gain life in the public imagination and, crucially, in policymaking at the civic and state level. One instance of cultural production popularly referenced in government circles is the sci-fi novel Ministry of the Future by US writer Kim Stanley Robinson. The “carbon coin” proposed in the novel, which aims to achieve genuine wealth transfer from affluent countries to poorer ones, has a scientific foundation.43 It elegantly points out the obvious though inconvenient solution for addressing global income inequality. In my engagement in various think-tank dialogues, it has become evident that good works of sci-fi are essentially deductive mental experiments, whereas in reality nothing is controllable. Like analytical philosophy, designing these imaginative speculations about the future requires establishing a starting point from which subsequent reasoning, scenarios, and consequences are developed as realistically and profoundly as possible. In this regard, not only George Orwell’s Animal Farm but also nineteenth-century realist novels by Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, and Leo Tolstoy can be read as good sci-fi works, not to mention Marxist writings—all as demonstrations of radical speculation. Through this kind of sci-fi exercise we can consider challenging questions pertaining to a multipolar world, such as how to move beyond the teleology of liberal democracy, design new state alliances, reconfigure citizenship as a package of unbundled rights (and ensure that the stateless gain rights in the first place), and overcome the current right-wing resurgence. In this regard, I am inspired by one of my acquaintances, a performer-turned-game-designer who works in the strategy unit of a national government designing future scenarios and encouraging public officials to explore out-of-the-box thinking.

Where experiments are underway, my analysis can only be telegraphic. These are the spaces where art in a post-globalization world can thrive. Common among all my examples is an agency premised on and harnessed by experiences of the multipolar world. This horizon of an art and culture to come may not look like the work we see in biennials, centers of contemporary art, and university programs today. Indeed, art and culture will not even be the end product of these efforts, but art and culture can move up the scale of complexity and—let it be said—power. There is something deeply empowering about being an agent in setting agendas for a world after multipolarity. This is an era in which we need to update our compass for states, institutions, civic spaces, and values.