Artnet News critic Ben Davis presents his annual "art words of the year" for 2025, a curated list of terms that capture prevailing moods and ideas in the art world. The list includes "antimemetics" (from writer Nadia Asparhouva and internet fiction), "cyniserity" (coined by art writer David Colman to describe Anne Imhoff's work), "delightmare" (a horror-adjacent feeling linked to overconsumption and AI art, exemplified by Beeple's Art Basel installation), "elite capture" (from philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's book, now a tool for critiquing identity politics in art), and "K-shaped" (an economic term describing divergent recovery, applied to gallery closures versus record auction sales).
This article matters because it offers a critical, reflective lens on the art world's cultural and economic currents in 2025, moving beyond mere news to diagnose underlying sentiments and contradictions. By coining and popularizing these terms, Davis provides a vocabulary for understanding phenomena like the tension between sincerity and cynicism in contemporary art, the unsettling rise of AI-generated imagery, and the growing inequality between top-tier auction successes and struggling galleries. The piece serves as a barometer of the art industry's psychological and structural state at year's end.