Art Talks #5 Recap: "The Canon Must Die — Art Talks x PMF 2025"
Big hello!
This month, Art Talks joined the Prague Microfestival with a session called “Dissolving the Canon.”
We explored what the art canon means — and how artists today are questioning and reshaping it.
The canon decides which artworks are remembered, taught, and valued. But it can also exclude many others. Our discussion asked: What happens when those old structures begin to dissolve?
🗳 Keep or Kill
We began with voting, or in another word, “Keep or Kill.”
Everyone received two cards — green for Keep and red for Kill — and voted on different parts of the art world.
Here are some of them, if you feel like sharing your thoughts:
- The dominance of oil painting in museums
- Market value as a measure of importance
- Art schools as gatekeepers
- Public monuments and their histories
- The “Idea of Genius”
- Art prizes and competitions
- NFTs
- Experimental sound art
- Art history memes
- “I could do this”
- Overpriced gallery wine 🍷
After voting, we discussed together:
Why did you choose to keep or dissolve (kill) something?
What makes something worth keeping — and what makes it ready to change?
This activity showed that our sense of artistic value is subjective, even though there was many points we agreed to each other. Also, dissolving something doesn’t mean destroying it — it can also mean making space for new ideas. So good thing is, it's always open to discussion. :)
🖼 Talk: How Canons Dissolve
The illustrated talk looked at how artists around the world are challenging and expanding the canon.
Instead of replacing old names with new ones, they are opening art history to more voices, materials, and stories.
We explored eight different approaches.
1. Visibility
Visibility is about who/what is being seen, and who has been left out?
Some artists dissolve the canon simply by making visible what has always existed but wasn’t recognized — new subjects, new faces, new histories.
With "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96)", Carrie Mae Weems gives new meaning to old photographs of enslaved people, turning them from tools of oppression into acts of remembrance.
2. Translation
How do ideas, images, and cultures shift when they move between contexts?
In Raptures (1999), Shirin Neshat uses two video screens — one showing men, the other women — to explore how culture and faith shape understanding.
Her work represents the feeling of living between worlds, and she's translating the feelings to art.
3. Fracture
What happens when an artwork refuses coherence?
Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988) layers voices, letters, and images to show how communication can break apart under exile.
Her work embraces fragmentation as truth, not as failure.
4. The Frame
Frame is about how media controls what we see and how we see it, and how artists change the frame to present an idea.
The frame can mean museums, markets, or even the literal camera frame. Artists who challenge the frame question the systems that define what counts as ‘art’ or ‘value.’
Cindy Sherman uses photography in Untitled Film Series (1978), to expose how media and culture define gender. By performing as different characters, she questions who controls the image — and how stereotypes are created.
5. Interference
Interference might come through activism, media manipulation, or direct participation. It’s aboutdisrupting comfort — making noise inside an already established system.
Candice Breitz’s Love Story (2016) deals with mediation on a different level. The installation pairs refugee testimonies with performances by Hollywood actors, exposing how empathy and attention are shaped by celebrity and media systems. The work forces viewers to question whose stories are heard, and through what intermediaries.
6. Material Memory
Danh Võ’s We the People (2013) rebuilds the Statue of Liberty in fragments spread around the world, questioning ideas of freedom and belonging.
Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture A Subtlety (2014) connects beauty and sweetness with histories of labor and slavery.
Both artists show how materials themselves can hold memory.
7. Multiplicity
Multiplicity rejects the idea of a single, stable perspective. It values coexistence — multiple narratives, styles, and identities at once. This approach dissolves the canon by refusing hierarchy and embracing complexity.
Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases (2006 - ongoing) is a perfect example of this shift. Since 2006, Muholi has been photographing Black LGBTQ+ individuals in South Africa, building an ever-growing visual archive. The series is not just portraiture — it’s documentation, activism, and collaboration at once. Each photograph honors individuality, but together they form a collective identity that resists erasure.
By continuing the project for nearly two decades, Muholi turns representation into a living, evolving structure — one that refuses closure or categorization.
8. Renewal
How do we imagine art history after the canon?
Renewal isn’t about creating a new list of “important” artists. It’s about keeping art history alive — open, flexible, and continuously rewritten through dialogue and new contexts.
Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2006) invited people in Havana to speak freely for one minute — turning art into an act of participation and freedom.
Her work reminds us that renewal is about dialogue and shared expression, not permanence.
💬 Closing Reflection
Final questions;
What makes something worth keeping in art — and what makes it ready to dissolve?
If the canon reflects power, how can that power be redistributed rather than erased?
How do new tools and contexts — from AI to social media — shape what becomes visible or invisible in art today?
Can art history ever exist without a canon, or will we always create new ones?
Dissolving the canon means keeping art history alive: open, flexible, and constantly rewritten through new voices and ideas.
See you soon!
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