Every two years, artists, curators, collectors and collectors converge on Venice—a destination for caravans since the age of the Silk Road—for the preview of the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, which takes place days before the public opening of the Venice Biennale itself, the oldest, most prestigious and most-attended event in contemporary art. Every two years, in the soup of this malarial, aquamarine lagoon of a city, pretension and populism meet, and an agenda is hatched, for what art might yet become and how it will present itself to the public at large.
As I descended into Marco Polo Airport for the preview of the 61st edition of the Biennale, I had a question in mind—one that had been coming up over and over in private conversations for at least a year and a half. At gallery dinners and over the din of VIP art-fair previews, everyone seemed to be asking each other the same thing: Is the art world becoming like opera? In other words, is contemporary art, like so many other cultural forms, becoming an increasingly insular space, where insiders dominate the conversation, fellow artists serve as the audience, and elite patronage keeps the lights on?
Last year, in an “Actors on Actors” interview with Matthew McConaughey, Timothée Chalamet shared a similar anxiety about cinema, and the prospect of working in a medium “where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though, like, no one cares about this anymore.” As the reaction from defenders of opera and ballet demonstrated, it’s a hard subject to talk about without offending people, however unintentionally. No one wants to be perceived as irrelevant.
3EE4EP4 Venice, Italy. May 8th, 2026. The mural is a recent work by street artist TvBoy, which appeared near Ponte Paternian in Venice. The work depicts a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, wearing a long green dress, seemingly sinking into the waters of the Venetian lagoon. The Mona Lisa holds a white sheet of paper on her lap with the words “art is dead” written in red. Credits : Ferdinando Piezzi/Alamy Live NewsFerdinando Piezzi / Alamy Stock Photo
The people I heard asking the question were mostly anxious mid-career artists, whose professional lives began, broadly speaking, in the same post-internet art moment as my own. In the halcyon days of the Great Recession and its aftermath, the promise of social media and mobile computing appealed as much to artists as entrepreneurs. Technology develops in bursts, rapidly moving the frontier of the possible forward. The terrain that opens up attracts the eccentric, the grandiose, and the ambitious in equal measure, all chasing the opportunity to experiment with new forms, reach new audiences, and, of course, profit.
The fear of becoming opera is the fear of becoming locked into a format that is no longer able to contend with the present, whose only hope of feeling contemporary is to make a kitsch reference to memes. The current staging of The Magic Flute at the New York Metropolitan Opera House includes a 6-7 joke. In a TikTok clip of one performance, you can hear raucous laughter from elderly attendees yield to youthful groans and possibly even some boos. No one wants to be perceived as old. No one wants to dedicate themselves to something which—rightly or wrongly—is perceived as a cultural dead end.
Perhaps this is why those post-internet artists, who are now making the delicate transition into middle age, are particularly worried about art becoming opera. They’ve spent their youth making works out of PDFs, websites, and memes, caring more than anything about experimenting with distinctly non-traditional forms, about making art that could be disseminated to the widest audience possible, and—crucially—about that art meaning something to that broad audience. Many have decamped to pop culture or the internet itself, still chasing the viral high of their youth, becoming creative directors, podcast hosts, or even Silicon Valley employees. According to Jon Rafman, one of the most successful artists to come out of that cohort, who has maintained a traditional art practice alongside collaborations with some of the biggest brands and celebrities of our time—Balenciaga, Grimes, and Kanye West, among them: “In the heyday of post-internet, the work felt vital. It was touching a nerve in broader culture. There was real cohesion between fashion, music, and art — everyone was in conversation. Now,” he lamented, “culture itself feels fragmented.”
