State of the Arts, 2025
DJCS

The financial precarity in Aotearoa is spilling fast into the social, cultural, and psychic. In this climate a peculiar ecosystem has formed in the art sector. I’m going to use the term “sector” because at this stage I would argue we are beyond an art “community.” Aesthetic replication, surveillance, and institutional fear. Artists are leaving art school producing works that mirror what they’ve seen overseas or online rather than what they know or feel. I keep seeing it at graduate shows. An aesthetic flattening, where art is treated as an algorithm. What’s being lost is conviction. An understanding of where ideas come from, what history or lineage they belong to, and why they matter.

Scarcity is the rule now. Public funding is thinning and private philanthropy has stepped in to fill the gaps. The result is seemingly less freedom. Galleries are programming to satisfy funders rather than artistic urgency. Artists, in turn, internalise those same metrics by making work to please the gallery, the curator, the funding body, or the audience. It isn’t literal censorship, but the effect is the same. There’s a narrowing of thought and a compliance disguised as innovation. Many artworks that might emerge within radical conditions are quickly historicised and nullified by the institution. 

Creative New Zealand’s recent push for “diversified incomes” has nudged many spaces toward privatisation. Suddenly the health of public culture largely depends on private donors whose interests often clash with the values of the work they fund. Oil money, Zionist philanthropy, and other conservative networks all circulate quietly through our arts ecology using cultural spaces to launder harm. This is artwashing. And younger artists, desperate for opportunity in a shrinking field, often don’t realise they’re pandering to it.

Within this ecosystem those at the bottom of the ladder are watching each other. Artists compare their followings; curators compare their careers; galleries monitor each other’s programming. Tall-poppy syndrome, our national allergy to difference, merges with capitalism’s self-surveillance. We keep each other small because the conditions reward smallness. Instead of collectivising, we compete.

Reading Zoe Butt’s essay The Burden(?) of Artistic Visibility in Vietnam Today, I was struck, if not alarmed, by the parallels. She writes about artists withdrawing from public view to avoid State persecution. In post-Tiananmen China, Gao Minglu described “proposal art” as work made outside of the eye of the State privately at home, within limited means, shared among trusted peers. These practices were modest, often domestic, but intellectually vast. Their importance lay not in visibility but in relation, in how an idea was held and by whom. One of those artists pivotal in Hanoi’s ‘proposal art’ equivalent, Tran Luong, is currently exhibiting at the Govett-Brewster in Ngāmotu.

Aotearoa isn’t an authoritarian state. Our surveillance is subtler. The pressures are often economic and institutional rather than governmental, yet they still shape what can be said. I saw it most clearly in the institutional silence around the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, where neutrality became a code word for fear. I wrote to the Aotearoa Public Art Gallery Directors Network when the genocide began asking to write a collective statement to our government in defense of Palestine on behalf of the art sector. Few replied, and those who did said they couldn’t speak. Months later came a handful of hesitant Instagram statements. That culture of hesitancy kills conviction. Now, Aotearoa is one of few countries not to recognise Palestinian Statehood.

I’ve experienced this kind of silencing directly too. A curator once omitted my involvement in a project in an act of historical revisionism designed to simplify a narrative and centre their own research interests. The result was an inaccurate, flattened account that removed complexity, context, and contradiction - everything that gives art history its texture. These gestures might seem administrative, but they’re ideological. They shape what stories survive and whose labour is remembered.

Butt’s idea of an “alternative CV” feels urgent here. Instead of measuring practice through visible modes like exhibitions, she suggests recognising the invisible labour such as conversations over coffee, reading groups, posters made with friends, protests, DMs, the exchanges that actually sustain contemporary art. These are the things that hold the field together. When I was working in my institutional role, I realised how much more alive artwork felt in informal contexts such as talking with artists late at night, discussing artwork with a curator over a beer, swapping PDFs, helping each other mount the show. Constantly asking ‘what if…?’ as though the world was full of potential. Those acts of care matter more than most annual reports.

“Community” is a word that’s lost meaning for me, and I think could be a whole essay in its own right. In public art institutions it’s used constantly, often as shorthand for “diversity,” sometimes just to describe a friend group. But what is an art community? Is it a network of solidarity, or a stage for surveillance and punishment? To me, a real art community should be a space that can hold complexity, debate, and contradiction. A place where criticality is nurtured rather than punished. Yet increasingly, it feels as though our so-called art community orbits around “the public,” this vague and moralising entity we’re expected to serve. Without a strong, self-sustaining art community, we’re left exposed to the volatile whims of “the public” that may not understand the contexts of what we do. I’ve experienced personally how quickly things can spiral when critique escapes the field. The people who end up most isolated within the art “community” are those working inside it: the artists, curators and arts workers. These are often the people most dissatisfied, because in truth, there is no art community, only an art sector beholden to a series of imagined publics.

COMMODE was founded as an antidote to this. It’s currently unfunded. I’m living on the benefit. I’m doing it anyway. Low-fi, low-budget, provisional, survival mode. We make what we can, with what we have, from where we are. The focus isn’t polish or professionalism but testing ideas and embracing what’s unresolved. We’re intentionally almost offline. The website is a record and not a spectacle. It’s not about cultivating a brand. It's about creating space where thought can happen freely and without surveillance. You could say we don’t believe in the public.

Consequently we’ve also made a conscious decision not to share much on social media. We don’t want to participate in public surveillance, or use art as advertising, or have artwork valued through social media metrics. COMMODE exists to break that logic. We want people to find things out differently, to move through conversation, proximity, and care, not through the feed. There’s a whole culture of artists sharing memes about leaving Instagram, but we’d like to propose that you actually do leave. Stop working within it. Step outside the algorithm and discover what’s happening beyond it. This is our small insistence toward a different kind of attention.

That doesn’t mean rejecting money altogether. I still apply for funding, and I still want to pay artists and bills. We can hold that contradiction critically, acknowledging that money is necessary. Besides, this is precisely what public funding should be for. Breaking out our world into many, not folding everyone into the same box. We sometimes have no choice but to exist inside a compromised system while trying to resist being defined by it. 

Recently I spoke with a younger artist who’d been mistreated by a gallery yet still admired it because its Instagram account mirrored those of New York galleries. They equated global aesthetics with success and community with online visibility. But nothing material changes through algorithms. You don’t build solidarity, or community, by liking a post. You build it by showing up, talking, doing the work together. That must include for artists and artworks outside your usual interests.

Aotearoa behaves like a soft dictatorship. Institutions moderate themselves into silence; many artists measure success by brand. We need to learn to operate otherwise. Hold our contradictions, work when no one’s watching, make art that resists easy capture. We can seek funds, but on our own terms and together. The work must continue, with conviction. Not for sales, not for followers, not for likes. For conversation, solidarity, and the endurance of art as a way of producing and sharing knowledge, history, thinking, acting, and living.

My small contribution to this is a form of fugitive curating. Quiet, relational, outside the visible frame. Circulation that resists its institutional framing. We need to recentre critical discourse and local solidarity in this climate of austerity and remember that not all art needs to be seen to matter. We can put the capital A back in Art by pulling it out of the systems that are suffocating it.