Documenta, democracy and the crisis of liberalism

documenta, Germany’s most prestigious quintennial mega-exhibition was established in 1955 with the post-fascist remit of showcasing democracy and artistic freedom. However, the most recent edition of 2022 curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa was plagued with criticisms even before it opened, with a frenzied media storm launched against it, and calls for it to be pre-emptively shut down. Indeed, this documenta soon emerged as a battleground for the very future of art’s politicality – with debates around its state funding tantamount. In fact, the mega-exhibition has since become a case-study par excellence in the disquieting dismantling of cultural freedom. This chapter asks what led to this crisis? What changed so significantly in twenty years of German cultural history? And how had documenta’s cultural freedom been so questioned in the wake of 2022, that it seems the exhibition could no longer be permitted to celebrate diversity, debate or engage with open conversations about cultural complexity and contemporary politics? This chapter proposes that perhaps the Left’s political claims for art back at the turn of the millennium failed to go far enough, and surrendered the real political potential of art – for a mere reconfiguration of “resistance as aesthetics” as the critic T.J Demos ( 2023 ) has put it, which mistakenly prioritises “identitarian micropolitics over class struggle” (p. 126). But more profoundly, the chapter argues that documenta’s decline also reveals a larger political crisis: the failure of Western liberalism – which arguably reached its apogee when the democratic world watched or were complicit in Israel’s recent genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza: a geopolitical conflict and humanitarian crisis which saw not only the future of documenta, but of the democratic freedom of political and artistic speech, and our right to peacefully protest hang in the balance.