Only When Artists Reclaim Their Power Will Art’s True Power be Felt in Our Culture

By Shoja Azari

I arrived at this conviction out of a deep frustration with the contemporary art world: the closed loop of exchange value, the self-congratulatory hubris of the same faces at every fair and biennale, and the deifying careerism of artists themselves, who often engage in mindless overproduction, leading to a state of paralyzing saturation. In my frustration, I imagined a radical act of refusal. What if artists collectively went on strike—not by ceasing to create, but by refusing to exhibit, publish, play, or screen?

This strategic stoppage, I conjured, would accomplish two vital things. First, it would create a void in the culture that could not be ignored, a silence where the static of the market finally ceased. This absence would be a profound presence, forcing a society accustomed to aesthetic consumption to confront the emptiness left behind. Second, it would carve out a necessary space for my fellow artists to reflect on their practice at a time when humanity seems to be sleepwalking into hell. I began connecting with other artists—painters, novelists, filmmakers—arguing for the necessity of such a movement. We could treat the rebellion itself as a performance, a durational piece documented in weekly gatherings and publicly broadcast Zoom meetings. This act of collective withdrawal would be our cafe, our hangout, our movement. We would be consciously reaching back to a time before the neoliberal era, when artists formed communities not just for camaraderie, but for solidarity. They met, they supported each other, they were reflective of the social forces of their time, and they reacted by creating movements like 

the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the Situationists.

The Dadaists, Surrealists, and Situationists were not just making art; they were building counter-cultures. In the face of a world they found morally and spiritually bankrupt, they created their own realities and their own rules. In many ways, our time feels even more dire. We navigate the emergence of techno-feudalism, the erosion of truth by deepfakes, the menace of total surveillance, and a culture that is at once desperate, apathetic, narcissistic, and deeply alienated. In such an environment, art that plays by the established rules is necessarily impotent, and atomized artists become redundant within the hegemonic culture. My plea to my fellow artists was to rise together against this redundancy, to break away from the celebratory merry-go-round and assume their power as essential cultural workers.

Initially, my fellow artists regarded my suggestion with wide-eyed disbelief, dismissing it as a crazy, impossible, and even harmful idea. That was before we witnessed and followed in horror an ongoing genocide and watched the world plunge into preparations for what may be the third—and final—war of humanity. The context for art has fundamentally shifted. The theoretical void I once imagined now feels like a premonition of the actual abyss we peer into. With this new and terrifying urgency of our time, I pitch the project once more. For it is only through a collective and conscious refusal, a reclamation of our voice and our space, that the true, transformative power of art can be restored.