“What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased.”
—Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan
Pinkham, Monthly Review Press, 2000, p. 39.
In recent decades, “pluralism” has been elevated to an uncontested good in contemporary art discourse. A term once charged with oppositional energy—contesting aesthetic hegemony, narrative centrality, and institutional dominance—has become institutional dogma. Today, pluralism functions less as a critical provocation than as a professional norm, woven into the operational grammar of global biennials, triennials, acquisition policies, and funding frameworks. What happens when the rhetoric of multiplicity and inclusion is naturalised within the very systems it once sought to destabilise? Has pluralism retained its disruptive capacity, or has it calcified into what we might call a new orthodoxy: a consensus-driven ideology that performs diversity while securing institutional continuity?
This question becomes urgent at a moment of heightened global instability and institutional volatility. The resurgence of authoritarian politics, exemplified by the Trump regime’s open hostility toward cultural pluralism and institutional autonomy, has exposed the fragility of liberal consensus. Simultaneously, global conflicts in Western gaze—most notably in Gaza and Ukraine—have intensified debates over censorship, solidarity, and the limits of artistic speech. These pressures reverberate across the art world, as evidenced by Creative Australia’s unprecedented decision to dump artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative at Venice 2026 or the executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” wherein Trump accused the Smithsonian of putting forward a version of history that “deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.” “Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement,” Trump wrote, “the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” While the India experiments with its new mega projects such as the Yuge Yugeen Bharat National Museum.
In this context, the promise of pluralism appears increasingly compromised: not only exhausted by curatorial overuse, but actively threatened by ideological retrenchment. This essay considers whether pluralism remains a viable framework for critique, or if its grammar of inclusion must now be fundamentally rethought.
Normalization of Pluralism
This essay critically examines the rise of pluralism as a dominant, even compulsory, curatorial and ideological principle in the global contemporary art field. Hailed as a corrective to Eurocentrism and a vehicle for postcolonial redress, pluralism now underwrites institutional reform and artistic visibility across geopolitical axes. Yet its widespread adoption has rendered it suspect: an omnipresent framework that risks functioning as a neutralising force—aestheticising difference while preserving existing hierarchies. This inquiry not only questions the current state of pluralism but also advocates for its re-politicization, asking whether it still holds critical potential in its current institutional form or has become a mode of aesthetic governance—sanctioned, marketable, and depoliticized.
To comprehend the institutionalization of pluralism, it’s crucial to delve into its intellectual and historical lineage. Emerging from the societal and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, pluralism in art initially signaled a critical opening: a rejection of formalist orthodoxy, singular narratives of modernism, and the Euro-American canon. It was born of and aligned with broader political struggles—civil rights, decolonization, second-wave feminism, and anti-imperialist movements—which collectively demanded access to visibility and a reconfiguration of the terms of aesthetic and political legitimacy.
In the U.S., this period saw institutions gradually responding to demands for representation by African American, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American artists, often through exhibitions that, while groundbreaking, remained ghettoised. The 1980s and 1990s introduced the language of multiculturalism, which rebranded pluralism in more palatable, managerial terms. Diversity became an asset—a bureaucratic objective rather than a radical critique. Critics like Bell Hooks and Stuart Hall warned of the dangers of commodifying difference, of reducing cultural identity to an aesthetic surface or institutional checkbox.
Simultaneously, the rise of postmodern theory disrupted notions of artistic universality. Jean-François Lyotard’s idea of the “incredulity toward metanarratives” resonated with pluralism’s scepticism of centralised aesthetic authority. However, this fragmentation also made it easier for institutions to absorb multiple discourses without changing their underlying structures. By the late 1990s, pluralism had shifted from a contentious force into a curatorial logic—a flexible, seemingly inclusive ideology capable of incorporating critique into institutional frameworks.
Artworld as construct
We begin with Arthur Danto’s seminal formulation of the ‘art world’ (1964), wherein the ontology of art is inseparable from the interpretive and institutional structures that confer meaning. For Danto, what distinguishes an artwork from a mere object is not intrinsic but contextual—a product of what he famously called an ‘atmosphere of theory.’ This ‘atmosphere of theory’ refers to the intellectual and interpretive environment within which art is created, exhibited, and understood. Danto’s insight established the art world as a constitutive framework, not a neutral backdrop, shaping the reception of art and the conditions of its legibility and value.
Lawrence Alloway extended this logic by emphasising the distributed nature of the art system. His vision of a pluralist network—comprised of artists, critics, curators, galleries, and the public—rejected vertical hierarchies and embraced cultural permeability. In Art and Pluralism, Nigel Whiteley articulates Alloway’s commitment to pluralism as an ethical stance rather than a stylistic pluralism: a democratic commitment to aesthetic and cultural multiplicity that welcomed popular culture and mass media into critical discourse.
Yet the pluralism that animated Alloway’s mid-century optimism diverges starkly from its contemporary incarnation. In many cases, what was once a challenge to cultural gatekeeping has become its camouflage. Today’s pluralist imperative often flattens difference into curated equivalence: a biennial checklist of global representation—Nairobi, Hanoi, São Paulo, Beirut—producing the illusion of diversity while avoiding systemic transformation. This is not simply tokenism but a deeper structural tendency: the rendering of multiplicity as spectacle. The form of inclusion may change, but the logic of legibility—who can be seen, by whom, and under what terms—remains largely intact.
Curating the Global
This logic is clearly illustrated through a series of case studies. Analysing major biennials merely as examples of pluralist inclusion risks missing their deeper structural role: staging difference and staging the management of difference. These exhibitions—Documenta, Gwangju, Sharjah, São Paulo—do not simply reflect the globalisation of art; they codify its logics, aestheticising dissent and choreographing diversity within the circuits of curatorial capital. What emerges across these cases is not a map of geopolitical distinctiveness but a syntax of strategic equivalence: an emergent grammar through which pluralism is rendered institutionally legible, market-compatible, and politically inert.
Documenta, especially since Documenta11 under Okwui Enwezor, has come to signify the biennial as a global tribunal. Its inclusion of postcolonial, migratory, and decolonial discourse was undoubtedly significant. Yet the mechanism of that inclusion—a discursive transposition into a European institutional framework—consolidated Kassel’s authority as an arbiter of global visibility. The pluralism at work here did not disrupt the symbolic economy of the North; it fortified it. Documenta’s global turn thus functions as a rebranding of curatorial sovereignty, where the inclusion of alterity is conditioned by its translation into the idioms of Western criticality.
The Gwangju Biennale began as an attempt to memorialise democratic resistance, invoking the 1980 uprising as both a historical referent and ethical anchor. However, as it became enmeshed in global curatorial circuits, Gwangju’s insurgent memory became aesthetic currency. Political themes persist, but often in the form of curatorial motifs—recurring themes or elements that are used to structure and present the artworks in the exhibition. These motifs often serve to flatten political themes into exhibitionary rhetoric. What might once have been an oppositional staging of difference becomes a biennial-format fidelity: justice as theme, inclusivity as structure, and critique as mise-en-scène. Local histories are curated through the lens of global legibility, often displacing the very antagonisms they once sought to foreground.
Sharjah Biennial operates at the threshold between postcolonial cosmopolitanism and authoritarian containment. Its exhibitions regularly invoke subaltern themes—displacement, resistance, colonial legacies—yet do so under the aegis of state-sponsored cultural diplomacy. Here, pluralism performs a dual function: it projects regional leadership in global art discourse while simultaneously neutralising internal critique. The politics of inclusion serve as a screen behind which censorship, control, and exclusion regimes persist. In Sharjah, pluralism is not resisted—it is weaponised.
São Paulo Biennial offers a South-South articulation of pluralism, yet it too reveals the limits of representational redress. While the biennial has increasingly showcased artists from the Global South, its frameworks often echo the cosmopolitan liberalism of Northern institutions. Marginalised voices are invited in but through tropes familiar to global curating: indigeneity, migration, hybridity, trauma. The effect is less an epistemic shift than reframing the periphery through the grammar of the centre. São Paulo’s pluralism thus risks becoming a soft power mechanism—a way for Brazil to assert international relevance without confronting its internal structures of race, class, and cultural hierarchy.
Taken together, these biennials exemplify the structural choreography of global pluralism: a curatorial logic that manages difference through spectacle, transforms political claims into thematic modules, and secures institutional legitimacy through the very forms of critique it appears to host. What seems to be global inclusion is often a recalibration of control.
These case studies illustrate how pluralism, even when grounded in anti-hegemonic intent, becomes filtered through the protocols of global exhibition-making. The rhetoric of inclusion persists, but the curatorial grammar through which it is articulated remains tightly bound to institutional legibility, funding politics, and cultural diplomacy. Representation is offered, but rarely are the terms of representation interrogated.
Andrea Fraser’s mapping of The Field of Contemporary Art offers a crucial analytic. She reveals the field’s absorptive capacity to metabolise critique, transforming dissent into symbolic capital. In this light, pluralism becomes not a site of resistance but a mode of institutional self-legitimation: disruption performed as a spectacle, with hierarchies undisturbed. Fraser shows that the system accommodates critique precisely to secure its own reproduction.
To move beyond this impasse, political theorist William E. Connolly provides a more robust philosophical foundation. In Why Pluralism? (2005) and related works, Connolly articulates a “deep pluralism”—an ontological orientation that treats difference not as an object of management but as constitutive of the society itself. Unlike the procedural pluralism of liberal accommodation, Connolly’s model is agonistic, unsettled, and resistant to closure. It refuses consensus as a goal, insisting instead on the ethical necessity of sustained contestation.
This distinction—between managerial and agonistic pluralism—is vital. The former enables institutions to stage diversity while preserving their operational logics; the latter confronts the epistemic and political conditions that shape the very terms of visibility and value. In global art, the managerial variant dominates. Artists from the Global South may now circulate more widely, but their legibility is often contingent upon translation into Euro-American idioms of critique, aesthetics, or market value. Inclusion thus becomes a mode of epistemic domestication—in her critique of sanctioned ignorance as epistemic violence, as articulated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, wherein difference is curated into familiarity and stripped of its political density.
Pluralism under Capture
A form of strategic pluralism emerges: the instrumental deployment of diversity to forestall more profound institutional critique. This is where the contributions of theorists like Fred Moten and Walter Mignolo become essential. Both have articulated frameworks that resist institutional co-optation, offering alternative epistemic and aesthetic modalities that challenge the premises on which dominant pluralist discourse is built.
Through his collaborative work with Stefano Harney and his solo writings, Fred Moten argues for the politics and poetics of refusal. In texts such as The Undercommons and Black and Blur, Moten articulates black study and aesthetics not as content to be included but as a fugitive mode of being that resists capture. He positions blackness as a site of generative ungovernability—what he calls “the stolen life of study”—that cannot be reconciled with the managerial logic of diversity. For Moten, the problem is not exclusion per se but the terms of inclusion: the coercive assimilation into legible forms. In this light, pluralism’s institutional embrace of racialised or minoritarian expression often neutralises their radical edge, translating disruptive practice into consumable difference.
Walter Mignolo, by contrast, offers a decolonial critique rooted in what he terms “epistemic disobedience.” His work challenges the colonial matrix of power that continues to shape knowledge production in the global North. In books such as The Darker Side of Western Modernity, Mignolo exposes how Western epistemologies are maintained as universal by systematically rendering other ways of knowing subordinate or invisible. In global art, this critique implicates curatorial frameworks that translate indigenous, diasporic, or non-Western practices into recognisable formats—what he calls “border thinking” when appropriated rather than embraced as autonomous knowledge systems. Mignolo’s framework demands a shift from inclusion to delinking: a refusal to participate in the aesthetic and epistemic terms imposed by dominant institutions.
These critiques reject the art world’s extractive economy, where difference is curated, circulated, and commodified for global consumption. The art market, in particular, plays a central role in shaping what forms of pluralism are legible and valuable. Works that signal cultural differences in ways that align with Western aesthetic codes often gain traction, while those that challenge or confuse these codes remain marginal. This dynamic perpetuates a regime in which diversity is aestheticised but not politicised, where representation substitutes for redistribution, and access is granted conditionally—dependent on translation, conformity, or marketability.
Strategic pluralism, then, is not merely a curatorial approach but a structural condition of the global art system. It allows institutions to perform radicality while preserving the status quo. It offers visibility without power and presence without transformation. Therefore, the task is not to demand more inclusion within these frames but to question them themselves. The instrumental deployment of diversity to forestall more profound institutional critique. It is visible in the biennial circuit’s thematic turns—diaspora, identity, resistance—now institutionalised into global curatorial templates. The result is a performance of inclusivity that too often conceals the geopolitical asymmetries of mobility, capital, and cultural authority.
Pluralism as a Site of Struggle
Against this backdrop, the task is not to reject pluralism but to re-politicise it. This means shifting from representational metrics to structural analysis: not simply asking who is visible but who sets the terms of legibility and toward what ends. As Danto, Alloway, and Fraser each make clear, the art world is a battleground, not a neutral site—a field organised by exclusions, gatekeeping, and symbolic economies.
Reclaiming pluralism, then, requires a return to its insurgent potential: not just expanding the canon but questioning its form, diversifying representation, and transforming the conditions of intelligibility and value. Connolly’s concept of micropolitical pluralism offers a possible path—an ethos of attentiveness to the minor, the incommensurate, the fugitive. It points toward practices of world-making that escape institutional capture: not merely inclusion within the field, but the invention of new fields altogether.
The critical question is not whether pluralism should persist but on what terms. The current pluralist paradigm too often confuses representation with transformation, visibility with agency, and diversity with justice. Pluralism must be uncoupled from institutional performativity and market validation to reclaim its political and ethical force. It must be reimagined not as a strategy of inclusion but as a commitment to structural contestation, epistemic multiplicity, and the refusal of dominant aesthetic terms.
This means taking seriously Moten and Mignolo’s insights—not simply as theoretical supplements to pluralism but as provocations to reframe the very grounds on which art is curated, circulated, and valued. It also means shifting focus from inclusionary optics to infrastructural change: Who funds? Who frames? Who decides? And what logics are reproduced in the process?
If it is to matter, authentic pluralism must cultivate forms of cultural and political life that are irreducible to representation. It must embrace illegibility as a tactic, opacity as a right, and dissonance as a method. It must support new actors in the art world and an entirely new art world—zones of fugitive planning, insurgent study, and decolonial possibility.
Only then can pluralism be rescued from its bureaucratic enclosure and returned to what it once was—and might still be: a horizon of struggle, a field of generative friction, and a proposition for how we might live, create, and know otherwise.