Every two years, artists, curators, collectors and collectors gather in Venice – a destination for caravans since the era of the Silk Road – for a preview of the international art exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, a few days before the public opening of the Venice Biennale, the oldest, most prestigious and most attended event in contemporary art. Every two years, in this malarial, aquamarine lagoon soup of a city, pretentiousness and populism meet, and an agenda is drawn up for what art can become now and how it will present itself to the public at large.
As I landed at Marco Polo airport for the preview of the 61st edition of the Biennale, I had a question in my mind – one that had been coming up again and again in private conversations for at least a year and a half. At gallery dinners and in the noise of VIP art-fair previews, everyone was asking each other the same thing: Is the art world becoming more like opera? In other words, is contemporary art, like many other cultural forms, increasingly becoming an insular space, where insiders dominate the conversation, fellow artists serve as spectators, and elite patronage keeps the lights on?
Last year, in an “Actors on Actors” interview with Matthew McConaughey, Timothée Chalamet shared similar concerns about cinema, and the prospect of working in a medium “where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even if, like, no one cares about it anymore.'” As the reaction from defenders of opera and ballet has shown, it’s a difficult topic to talk about without offending people, even if unintentionally. No one wants to be considered irrelevant.
3EE4EP4 Venice, Italy. May 8, 2026. The mural is a recent work of street artist TVBoy, which appeared near the Ponte Paternian in Venice. The work depicts a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, wearing a long green dress, who appears to be drowning in the waters of the Venice Lagoon. Mona Lisa holds a white sheet of paper in her lap with “Art is Dead” written in red. Credit: Ferdinando Piezzi/ Alamy Live NewsFerdinando Piezzi / Alamy Stock Photo
The people I heard asking questions were mostly anxious mid-career artists whose professional lives, roughly speaking, began in the same post-Internet art moment as my life. During the Great Recession and its aftermath, the promise of social media and mobile computing attracted entrepreneurs as well as artists. Technology develops in bursts, rapidly pushing the limits of what is possible. The territory that opens up attracts the eccentric, the lavish and the ambitious alike, all chasing the opportunity to experiment with new forms, reach new audiences and of course make a profit.
The fear of becoming opera is the fear of being locked into a format that is no longer able to compete with the present, whose only hope of feeling contemporary is to create a kitsch reference to memes. current staging of magic flute The New York Metropolitan Opera House consists of 6-7 jokes. In a TikTok clip of one performance, you can hear raucous laughter from the elderly attendees, which elicits youthful groans and possibly a few rebukes. No one wants to be considered old. No one wants to dedicate themselves to something that is – rightly or wrongly – perceived as a cultural dead end.
Perhaps this is why those post-Internet artists, now delicately transitioning to middle age, are particularly concerned about art becoming opera. Having spent his youth creating work from PDFs, websites, and memes, he cares more about experimenting with distinctly non-traditional forms, making art that can be disseminated to a wider audience, and – importantly – about making art that means something to that wider audience. Many have turned to pop culture or the Internet, still chasing the viral peaks of their youth, becoming creative directors, podcast hosts or even Silicon Valley employees. According to Jon Rafman, one of the most successful artists of that group, who has maintained a traditional art practice while also collaborating with some of the biggest brands and celebrities of our time—Baleniaga, Grimes, and Kanye West: “In the post-Internet days, work felt important. It was touching a nerve in the broader culture. There was real cohesion between fashion, music, and art—everyone was interacting. Now,” he lamented, “the culture itself felt Does.” Fragmented.”
