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| Berlin Conference 1884-1885 |
1885, Berlin Conference. The great powers of Europe gather to carve up a continent. With rulers and pens on a map, they invent new borders for Africa, a continent most of them had never truly seen. This act, the Berlin Conference, is the starkest possible declaration of the modern imperial project: the power to define reality from a distance, to render a vast, complex world into a resource to be managed and extracted.
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| Beijing Victory Day Parade 2025 |
2025, Beijing Victory Day Parade. The setting shifts, but the underlying dynamic echoes. It’s not a conference of colonial division, but the culmination of a new form of hegemony. This one isn't primarily built on territorial occupation, but on data flows, economic dependency, digital infrastructure and the greatest display of power in history. It’s an imperialism of the supply chain and the social credit score, a system where influence is projected not only by gunboats, but by algorithms and debt diplomacy.
This period—from Berlin 1885 to Beijing 2025—frames the lifespan of the Western Imperial project. And it is precisely, uncannily, the same period that gave us what we call Modern Art.
So, we must ask: were they symbiotic? And as one ends, does the other die with it?
The Space of Strangeness: Where Modern Art Was Born
Modern Art was born in the shadow of the empire. Think of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Those fractured, mask-like faces were a direct shockwave from his encounter with African artifacts in the Trocadéro Museum in Paris. These objects, ripped from their ritual contexts and displayed as trophies of conquest, became the fuel for a European artistic revolution.
This was only possible because of space—the physical and psychic distance between the metropolis (Paris, London, Berlin) and the colony (Congo, Algeria, India). That distance created a zone of mystery, a "there" that was fundamentally other. This otherness was a resource. It provided the exotic, the primitive, the unsettling forms that artists used to shatter the tired conventions of European realism. The colony was the "outside" that modernism needed to define its "inside."
The Collapse of Distance and the End of the "Outside"
Then came the internet.
Instant information transfer has done what no anti-colonial revolution could fully achieve: it has annihilated that sacred, productive space. The colony is no longer a distant, imagined land of strange gods and raw materials. It is a live stream, a Twitter feed, a TikTok video. The "savage" is on Zoom. The "exotic" is a meme.
The digital realm has created a perpetual, global metropolis. There is no "outside" left to discover, to plunder for aesthetic novelty. The shock of the new, which was the engine of modern art for 150 years, is now a continuous, homogenized feed. How can you be an "outsider" artist when everyone is connected to the same central server?
The New Imperial Galleries: Museum as Propaganda, Gallery as Black Market
In this new reality, the institutions of art have shed their genteel disguises and revealed their core functions.
The Museum is no longer just a temple of contemplation; it is a premier spotlight for political propaganda. In the West, exhibitions like "Modernism in Ukraine", "LGBTQIA+tours" or"contemporary African art" or "diasporic voices" are often a form of soft-power penance, a way to perform inclusivity while the economic structures of neocolonialism remain intact. In the East, vast new national museums project an unbroken lineage of civilization and state power, weaponizing culture to assert a new global order. The museum’s role is to curate a politically useful version of reality.
The Commercial Gallery, meanwhile, has perfected its role as a conduit for opaque regulated store of value. In a world of sanctioned oligarchs and globalized capital, a multi-million-dollar art sale is an elegant way to move wealth across borders, tax-free and untraceable. The art is not the point; is the vehicle. The gallery is the respectable storefront for a financial clearing house.
So, Has Art Ended?
If art was merely the nervous tic of a specific imperial system—if it was just the West processing its colonial anxiety and loot through aesthetic form—then perhaps yes. The "great age" that began in 1885 is over, and the art that was bound to it is gasping for air, drowning in the digital sameness it helped create.
But I don't think art is ending. I think it's being forced to shed its modern skin.
The end of this imperial distance and the exposure of the art world's cynical mechanics is not a death knell. It is an excruciating, necessary liberation. Art can no longer be about finding the next "primitive" shock. It can no longer pretend to purity in a system fueled by laundered money and geopolitical posturing.
The task for the artist now is not to explore a mythical "outside," but to navigate the terrifying, claustrophobic, and interconnected "inside." The new art will be born not from the space between continents, but from the friction between the algorithm and the soul, between the propaganda message and the lived experience, between the global market and the local body.
The age from Berlin to Beijing is over. The art that defined it is a closed chapter. What comes next will be something else entirely—something we don't yet have a name for, emerging from the ruins of the museum and the shadow of the black market.
The canvas is blank again....