Scare Quotes

“Wither contemporary art”—the handy removal of an h turned the would-be question into a dreary statement, the title of a conversation at the SVA Theatre between critic Dean Kissick and edgeladies Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, of the Red Scare podcast. Few art critic talks have a ticket price ($25, in this case). Few draw lines that stretch down the block. But this one, occasioned by Kissick’s viral cover story for the December 2024 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “The Painted Protest,” was the most mobbed art talk I’ve ever attended, filling nearly all of the theater’s 479 seats.

“The Painted Protest” riffs on an essay published half a century ago in the same magazine by the conversative critic Tom Wolfe, “The Painted Word.” Where Wolfe complained (correctly) that theories of art had supplanted art, Kissick griped that moralizing identity politics have done the same. No shit. The essay was loved by few and discussed by everyone, barging into group chats and holiday gatherings like a drunk uncle. The talk seemed positioned as Kissick’s coup de grâce, but like contem…