At the preview of the 61st Venice Biennale, artists, curators, and collectors gathered in Venice amid a growing anxiety that contemporary art is becoming like opera—an insular, elite-dominated cultural form that risks irrelevance. The article explores this fear through conversations with mid-career post-internet artists, who worry that the art world is losing its ability to engage broad audiences and contend with the present, much like opera and ballet have been perceived as cultural dead ends.
This matters because it reflects a deep existential crisis within the contemporary art world, particularly among artists who came of age during the post-internet era and now face the transition into middle age. The comparison to opera highlights concerns about patronage, audience engagement, and the sustainability of art as a meaningful public discourse, raising urgent questions about whether the art world can adapt or will become a locked-in format that only serves insiders.