Poetic Justice
26th October 2022
In his canonical 1993 book The Invisible Dragon, art critic Dave Hickey prophesied that the “therapeutic institutions”—art schools, museums, and fund-granting bodies—will eventually jettison any art that does not fit the bureaucratic precepts du jour. Over the next three decades, as the art world’s priorities shifted from aesthetics to ostentatious displays of political virtue, Hickey’s prediction that puritanical intellectuals and activists would conquer culture in the name of social justice has been conclusively vindicated.