Art in an Age of Fear
- Diamond Zhou
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
June 13th, 2026
By Diamond Zhou
Written with time, thought, and a human pulse.
Sometimes I ponder how we are living through a strangely fearful cultural moment. People are afraid to speak too freely, to praise too directly, to disagree too firmly, to touch, to joke, to admit uncertainty, to ask the wrong question, or to be misunderstood by someone already prepared to translate “a bad day” or trauma into injury. The result is not a more humane culture, but often a colder one. We have become so fluent in the language of “care”, “accountability”, “safety”, and “harm”, yet increasingly unsure how to actually practise real human interactions that is created from warmth, candour, forgiveness, or trust.
Having lived roughly half my life before this vocabulary became so dominant, I remember a world where affection, humour, disagreement, and ordinary intimacy did not always require advance negotiation. This is one of the more troubling contradictions of our age. A vocabulary that was meant to make us more attentive to one another has, in many ways, made us more suspicious of one another. Necessary movements for justice have exposed real abuses of power, real exclusions, real humiliations, and real silences. That cannot be dismissed. But something has gone wrong when the moral imagination narrows into reflexive accusation, when every awkwardness is treated as evidence, every difference as hostility, every uncertainty as cowardice, and every institution as guilty until it performs its innocence in public. The trouble is not that society has become too compassionate; the trouble is that it has become too anxious to know what compassion actually feels like.
Politics has created more anxiety from every direction. On one side, institutions fear being accused of harm, exclusion, complicity, or silence. On the other, they fear being accused of indoctrination, elitism, moral vanity, or political capture. The result is a public culture increasingly governed by pre-emptive defence. And in this climate, the most frightened and fearful voice in the room often acquire the greatest authority.
Fear does not only censor what can be said, it changes what can be felt, it makes people less generous, less humorous, less brave, and less willing to meet one another in the unstable space where real understanding sometimes begins. A culture afraid of misinterpretation will eventually become afraid of interpretation itself. A culture that cannot distinguish between harm and discomfort will have difficulty sustaining love, friendship, education, criticism, or art. And once fear becomes the dominant emotional pattern of a society, its institutions will not simply reflect that fear, they will begin to reproduce it.
Art museums now stand in the middle of this storm. They are expected to collect, conserve, research, interpret, educate, entertain, correct history, reflect community, foster belonging, address trauma, acknowledge injustice, demonstrate social relevance, satisfy funders, satisfy governments, satisfy artists, satisfy audiences and avoid causing offence. These demands often pull museums in different directions at the same time. It is difficult to satisfy everyone, and museum leaders are under constant pressure from many sides, and that is why we should not rush to condemn every decision they make. At the same time, museums still need to be evaluated and questioned, because they play an important public role. One of their most important responsibilities is to make space for difficult ideas, conflicting interpretations, and works of art that do not fit neatly into simple moral categories.
In a recent Globe and Mail interview with Kate Taylor, Eva Respini, interim co-director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, suggested that art museums should “stay in our lane,” which she described as supporting artists and giving them a platform. Respini explains, “when I think about my own expertise, it’s not about other things; it’s about art.” The remark is of great interest to us, not because it is a statement about one museum, one director, or one city, but because it names a larger institutional tension. In an age when museums are asked to respond to every political and social emergency, what does it mean for an art museum to remain faithful to art?
The answer cannot be to retreat. Art has never been outside the world, because it always carries politics, violence, faith, desire, class, race, grief, beauty, power, memory, exile, eroticism, cruelty, tenderness, and doubt. To say that museums should centre art is not to say that they should ignore society. It is to say that art is not merely a delivery system for institutional ethics. The museum’s task is not simply to announce what side of history it wishes to be on, but to preserve and interpret the works through which history remains difficult, unresolved, and alive.
This is where the language of responsibility can become confused. Museums should be accessible, ethical, inclusive, and attentive to the communities they serve. They should not pretend that collections are innocent, that canons formed themselves, or that exclusions were accidental. But inclusion cannot become the only mandate, just as activism cannot become the only measure of seriousness. A museum that forgets art in order to prove its virtue has not become more public-minded, it has become less intellectually honest about what it alone can do.
Francisco Goya understood something about fear, reason, and public life long before our own anxious century. In The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the sleeping figure slumps over his desk while owls, bats, and shadowed creatures gather behind him. The image does not say that reason alone saves us, or that imagination alone corrupts us. It shows something more unnerving: that when vigilance collapses, the mind fills with monsters of its own making. Every age produces its monsters.
Philip Guston’s hooded figures were not endorsements of the Ku Klux Klan. They were grotesque, accusatory, absurd, and morally filthy images of evil, cowardice, complicity, and the ordinary habits by which violence enters daily life. Yet in 2020, amid the trauma and intensity of the post-George Floyd moment, the long-planned Philip Guston Now retrospective was postponed by its organizing museums. The anxiety was not simply about the work, it was about reception. Would audiences understand the images? Would the institutions be accused of insensitivity? Would context be enough? The museums did not just fear racism. They feared misreading.
Misreading is part of art’s life in public. It is not always a failure, and dfficult works are not exhausted by the first anxious explanation attached to them. A museum should not be reckless with images of racial terror, but neither should it assume that viewers are so fragile, or so incapable of interpretation, that they must be protected from ambiguity itself. Guston’s paintings are unsettling because they implicate us in the banality of hatred. To delay them out of fear was not only to protect audiences from confusion, it was to withhold one of the very artistic encounters through which confusion might become thought.
The temporary removal of John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs from Manchester Art Gallery in 2018, in the wake of #MeToo, prompted discussions about the representation of women’s bodies. The gesture was framed as a provocation rather than censorship, and it did generate conversation. But the difficulty lies in the theatrical nature of the act. If the purpose was to make viewers think harder about the painting, why remove the painting from view? Why not trust the public to look, argue, recoil, defend, and reconsider?
The old museum model too often allowed beauty to float above power, as though eroticized images of women had no social history attached to them. That needed correction, but the correction cannot be to turn every difficult object into a test of institutional virtue. Hylas and the Nymphs is not innocent, but innocence is not a requirement for display. Artworks arrive from worlds shaped by desire, fantasy, hierarchy, myth, violence, and error. To show them is not to endorse every value they contain. It is to admit that culture is made of contradictions, and that looking honestly is harder than hiding beautifully.
Shahzia Sikander’s Witness, a golden female figure installed at the University of Houston, became the target of political and religious outrage after being associated by critics with abortion rights and feminist power. In 2024, the sculpture was beheaded by a vandal. Sikander later chose not to repair it, allowing the damaged work to remain visible as testimony to the violence directed at it.
Here fear becomes open aggression. A figure representing female authority is not debated, contextualized, or interpreted, it is attacked. That violence reveals what fearful politics often wants from art: not conversation, but submission. The beheaded sculpture becomes a terrible image of the moment itself, a witness not only to misogyny or ideological rage, but to the belief that a symbol one dislikes should not have the right to stand.
Amy Sherald’s recent withdrawal of her show American Sublime from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery stemmed from the controversy centred on her painting Trans Forming Liberty, Sherald’s portrait of a trans woman as the Statue of Liberty. Sherald saw the institution’s response as a failure to defend the integrity of the work under political pressure; the Smithsonian maintained that it had sought contextualization rather than removal. Whatever one makes of the details, the case is a reminder that fear does not belong to one political side. Institutions can fear progressive outrage, conservative outrage, government interference, donor anxiety, social media fury, and internal dissent. Fear is versatile, it just wears whatever costume the moment provides.
Art requires better from us. It requires the possibility that a work may disturb us, challenge us, confuse us, and offend us. It also requires the possibility that institutions may sometimes be wrong, that artists may sometimes be careless, that audiences may sometimes see what curators did not, and that communities may carry histories too deep to be handled as curatorial themes. None of this is simple.
A fearful culture wants rules in advance. It wants to know which images are safe, which words are permitted, which histories may be touched, which identities may be represented, which gestures will be punished, which moral position will protect the institution from accusation. But art does not become meaningful by obeying the safest available language, it becomes meaningful by forcing perception into contact with what it would rather avoid.
The institution’s mandate is not neutrality, because neutrality is often only power hiding its preferences. Nor is it activism in every instance, because activism is not the only form of seriousness. A museum must preserve, interpret, question, and defend art while remaining alive to the society around it.
The challenge is one of judgment. Museums will continue to face competing demands from artists, audiences, governments, donors, and communities, no rule can resolve those tensions in advance. What matters is whether institutions have the confidence to defend difficult work when it deserves defending, and the humility to reconsider decisions when circumstances genuinely require it. Art remains one of the few public spaces where contradiction can be held without immediate resolution. It allows conflicting histories, values, and experiences to exist side by side without forcing them into a single conclusion. That capacity is increasingly valuable in a culture that rewards certainty and punishes hesitation.
If museums are to matter now, they must protect that space. Not because art is above politics, but because it offers something politics often cannot: the opportunity to think before choosing sides.
In an age of fear, that may be art’s most necessary public function.
WATCH
Edward Burtynsky in conversation with John O’Brian
For those who were unable to join us in person, we are very pleased to be able to share the recorded conversation between Edward Burtynsky and John O’Brian. It was an extraordinary evening of looking, listening, and thinking together, and we hope this recording allows the conversation to continue beyond the room.
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