Is Refik Anadol The Art World's Donald Trump?
Below I attempt at tracing some parallels emerging between the world of politics and art today. It can be considered as a hot take of sorts, one of those ideas that are best written down as they come or else be forgotten entirely. There are overgeneralisations and hasty conclusions. I must credit two people who, through conversations, have helped these ideas to take shape: my long-time co-conspirator Gizem Şentürk and Istanbul-based artist Elmas Deniz. Though the responsibility of what follows is entirely mine, as I may have been unfaithful to the original contexts of our discussions.
I must apologize for my blatant use of ad hominem in the title. But if it seduced you into reading what follows, then I suppose it gets the job done. I won’t be talking much about Trump and his politics, or Anadol and his work here. Not primarily anyways – becoming a Jerry Saltz copycat of Turkish origin is certainly not one of my ambitions.[1] No, what I actually want to talk about are some generalizations regarding the forces at play in the art world and in the realm of politics today. They have been at play for quite some time now, and people have written about the different guises they take in one context or the other. Yet, I believe there is a perspective to be gained from a generalized overview that thinks together Refik Anadol and Donald Trump, and the larger tectonic shifts that these people are taken to represent, in art and in politics respectively. Both Trump and Anadol are at best symptoms of these shifts, and as such they constitute good enough proxies for the discussion that follows. Because lurking behind both is a story of the dissolving liberal consensus that has so far maintained its firm grip on not just the art world as we know it but also the fates of emancipatory-but-not-radical-enough politics.
So let me begin by explaining the thinking behind the proposition that Refik Anadol is the Donald Trump of the art world. Refik Anadol is the art world’s Trump, because the forces behind Trump’s infamous rise to power and Anadol’s acquisition of all too precarious art world fame seem to share a common denominator: a growing and popular dissatisfaction with the establishment. I believe so much is clear by now when one thinks of Trump. He has become the quintessential figure, the alpha-male of a new wave of fascism across the world, which in fact predates Trump himself and has among its ranks men much scarier than him or his dummies in Western Europe. They often capitalize on the anti-establishment sentiments of the masses, who have for a long time been denied access to the economic welfare promised to be the hallmark of liberal democracies. Pushed towards the margins of society, they became increasingly disenfranchised, thus more open to be preyed upon and demagogue-ed into forms of radical politics. This is somewhat of a classical and admittedly reductive take on the current divisions within the political landscape of the US and the West.
Refik Anadol, on the other hand, has a slightly more curious story. The actually-interesting-bit-of-the-artworld’s infatuation with him was born out of an exhibition he did for SALT in 2017, aptly titled Arşiv Rüyası (tr. Archive Dreaming). Somewhat unsurprisingly, it also died with that exhibition. The idea was there and it was good: to transform the archive from its often mediated, thus already authored nature to a dream-like space of knowledge where one could transgress, at least to some extent, its typical limitations with the help of AI technology. Though the application was regrettably poor, somewhat anticipating the fate of most AI-based art projects. What was interesting about this exhibition is how quickly it became a stepping stone in Anadol’s practice, which then consisted of potentially interesting new media works, like the collaborative project “Yekpare” from 2010, in which Anadol was a technical advisor. Having dabbled in AI, he dumped any and all intellectual interest in questions of the archive, received support from big-tech companies and his career as an LA-based AI artist exponentially grew.[2]
While his work does not have any immediate anti-establishment components, he nonetheless appeals and taps into the same emotive channels as the likes of Trump, in his ill-advised fight against his critics, Jerry Saltz of the New York Magazine the most prominent among them. One only needs to read into the comments section of several Instagram posts critiquing Anadol’s work. Often, people either agree with the criticism, or they loathe it. After a while Anadol inserts himself in the comments with either a provocative self-defence or a counter-attack. Other people follow his lead by showing support for their beloved artist (or maybe avatar?), who has saved them from the tyranny of “unrelatable”, “bullshit”, “nonsense” contemporary art.
Here is the crux of what I’m getting at: Since roughly 2015, we have been observing an upsurge in the number of people who attack the often out-of-touch and overcommercialised contemporary art world. One only needs to cite the taped banana event of 2019, the shredded Banksy of 2018, the eye glasses prank from 2016 or movies like the Velvet Buzzsaw (2019) and The Square (2017). These are some of the more sensational instances where frustration with the ridiculous shine and vanity of the contemporary art world joined forces with irreverent mockery in what may be described as a counter-attack against the established tastes of the art world.
Many other such examples of the ongoing counter-attack could be cited, and I do not believe it is possible to give a fairly comprehensive account of each instance and their roots. My intention is rather to point towards those who are best positioned to benefit from this counter-attack today. And here I must give credit to Istanbul-based artist Elmas Deniz, who during a conversation several years back gave me the inspiration for the thinking that follows. For this counter-attack operates in such a fashion so as to extinguish public support and interest for contemporary art at the expense of critical voices within the art world. The operation may be best outlined as follows: (1) the attacks oversimplify the art world and its manifold nature, often ignoring critical practices within (2) this oversimplification results in a withdrawal of public interest or engagement with art, or thereby limits it to ridicule (3) the practices that are most affected by this withdrawal are those very practices that were actually critical of the artworld’s mainstream tendencies in the first place (4) as a result, critical voices become disenfranchised, leaving the stage open for ever more ridiculous and shiny artworld which we have come to know. Post Covid-19 figures of the art market, and the recent crises at Documenta and the Istanbul Biennial, beside their immediate political contexts, also suggest to the increasingly rapid take-over of the existing public and quasi-public institutions of art by private and/or party interests.
What these criticisms and counter-attacks miss is the manifold nature of the artworld (or rather whatever’s left from it these days). They mistake the shine for the actual substance and as such play a significant role in the erosion of the substance. When the operation is over, the shine will be all we are left with.
Hence, Refik Anadol is the artworld’s Donald Trump. He is by far one of the most shining of all in the artworld, having capitalized on the AI hype. As for his work, it consists only of surface, enchanting whoever gazes upon it in a realm of infinite and directionless journey in a dreamland that seems to have come out of the Black Mirror world. (A clarification: I am admittedly an AI sceptic, but my disdain for Anadol comes rather from the fact that his post-2017 works are completely devoid of criticality and transformative power, which usually what makes for a good artwork). His admirers believe in him, believe that his “radical experiments with AI” will save us from the tyranny of “nonsense” contemporary art, while in reality it hollows out any and all potentiality for critical artistic practice. Much like Trump supporters’ belief in the “radical” politics of their avatar, which will save them from the tyranny of the liberal establishment, while in fact it will end up doing the exact opposite. Both Trump and Anadol succeeds in capitalizing on the frustration of disenfranchised masses, and both benefit from the failure of the left to come up with an alternative emotional paradigm that can capture and re-orient that frustration towards actually radical politics.
This is of course a line of criticism that must be advanced with some caution. I do not mean to equate the admirers of Anadol’s work with supporters of Trump, or by no means to implicate that those two categories of people constitute a perfect intersection. Rather, what is interesting is how, when abstracted into paradigm movements, they may point at a general direction for the contemporary world today. Within this picture, the more contemporary art world becomes the focus of ridicule, the more the critical voices that it is somehow still able to host within itself suffer. While the superficial, the fake and the irrelevant threads within it are able to survive. What is most dangerous about this state of affairs is that it is now possible to imagine contemporary art losing what’s left of its critical prowess. In a world rapidly sliding into the hands of neo-fascists (in their multiple incarnations), maintaining this cultural-critical front in whatever form possible is an important task.
[1] Following the showcase of Anadol’s work at MoMA, Saltz became one of the most outspoken critics of his work. The two ended up starting a heated online debate, summarised by the following: https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/refik-anadol-vs-jerry-saltz-2400275
[2] Admittedly, a more detailed historicization can prove me wrong here. I myself do not have the kind of patience to actually confirm what I think I know about Refik Anadol’s practice. I am allergic to his work. But I am also confident that even though some details may not be, I got the overall trajectory correct. Nonetheless you are advised to take all of this with a grain of salt.