dOCUMENTA has long outlived its purpose.
This large European exhibition which began in the ashes of Nazism as a staged act of cultural reparation has degenerated into a bureaucratic spectacle. It no longer provokes the public with new aesthetics; instead it administers to complicit Germans a form of cultural anaesthetics, helping them to feel great without confronting what has slowly but surely made their society a frightening place in the last decade. dOCUMENTA no longer confronts power even in the symbolic realm; it provides the optics of critique while insulating the German state from it.
This quinquennial ritual should have ended decades ago.
One could argue that Catherine David’s dOCUMENTA X in 1997, the first to insist on the global, to include media, theory, and politics as integral components of art, was the last time the show had a genuine claim to urgency. Or, if we are generous, that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s 13th edition in 2012, with its fractured geography across Kassel and Kabul among other places, staging art in the rubbles of past and present wars, marked the final credible attempt. The two editions since then have been excesses: the zombie cycle of state-funded distraction, kept alive to boost tourism in Kassel, gentrify Athens, provide cushy institutional careers for the members of the “cutarial teams” as well as sanitizing Germany’s image while its political entanglements get darker and more sinister as the time go by.1
Kassel itself was not an innocent stage for this spectacle to begin with. The city was a Nazi stronghold with mainstream allegiances to the Fuhrer. During the Third Reich, the town housed arms manufacturers like Henschel and Sohn, producing Tiger tanks and V-2 rockets with forced labor of you know who. The Allied bombing that flattened Kassel in October 1943 was a targeted strike against a city that functioned as a key node of Naziism’s militarized political economy.2
From the beginning, dOCUMENTA was not the clean break with fascism it claimed to be. It was built on continuity, on the recycling of Nazi era elites into the new cultural establishment, wrapped in the language of modernism and rehabilitation. Then as now, culture has been mobilized to cover over complicity, first in fascism, now in war, censorship, and repression. While Arnold Bode is remembered as its founder, one of his closest collaborators and the intellectual architect of the exhibition’s early days was the art historian Werner Haftmann. He joined the Nazi Party and served in fascist structures, and scholarship has linked him to wartime abuses. After 1945 he reemerged as a leading voice, shaping West German modernism and serving as a central figure in dOCUMENTA’s first editions, while his past was quietly ignored for decades. Only recently have German institutions begun acknowledging how deeply dOCUMENTA leaned into these compromised legacies.3
As Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art shows us, Modern art was nourished in the United States as a cultural weapon against Soviet communism, becoming not only an aesthetic but a geopolitical instrument, meant to showcase freedom in the West against the regimentation of socialist realism in the East. This cultural North Atlantic project linked New York and West Germany, deploying art as Cold War propaganda. The cultural realignment was stark: fascists who had been enemies of the Soviets in the 1930s and 40s were absorbed into the Western alliance after 1945 at all levels from science to art while Nazi-tainted scientists and intellectuals like Wernher von Braun and Haftmann found themselves aligned with American patrons, their pasts sanitized, their expertise instrumentalized. 4
Three years ago, dOCUMENTA fifteen, curated by Ruangrupa opened as a supposedly expansive, anticolonial exhibition: artists from everywhere, lumbung, or the traditional Indonesian rice barn, as a shared resource, a chorus of voices intended to shift the art world’s center of gravity. But the cracks began before artists finished installing their works. As I wrote in Arts of the Working Class following the show’s opening, “The roots of the current controversy about antisemitic imagery … need to be linked to Ruangrupa’s curatorial methodology … a product of European funding for global south art and the European plans for decentralized and outsourced cultural production envisioned as far back as 2006.”5
This was clearest in the scandal around Taring Padi’s mural. As I wrote in Spike, “It is astonishing that, as far as I can remember, nobody has compared the removal of Taring Padi’s mural with the designation and destruction of modernist art by Nazis in the 1930s as degenerate art.” I added that if the risky experiment of curatorial ineptitude was a chosen methodology for this edition, the curators should have insisted the work remain and argued that such friction is exactly what decentralization generates.6
In that same text I made the polemical point that Germans are the last people on earth who should be adjudicating antisemitism in art. It is as obscene as letting convicted pedophiles run a daycare. The real scandal was not in the painting but in the spectacle of German politicians, media, and institutions, basically the children of Nazis, posturing as moral authorities on Antisemitism while instrumentalizing their own history to censor others.
In retrospect, dOCUMENTA fifteen was also the furthest the exhibition has strayed from its Cold War alignment with the United States and, ironically, the closest it came to its Nazi roots with Taring Padi’s mural portraying Israeli soldiers and “jews” with hooked noses, money bags, and greedy expressions, imagery straight out of the caricatures published in the 1930s Nazi newspapers like Der Stürmer. German politicians cultural administrators had no choice but to pretend that this was not just offensive, if not also radioactive.
Astonishingly, the fact that an Indonesian collective could reproduce this cruel and historically loaded visual language was explained by Ruangrupa as a legacy of Dutch colonialism in their country, feeding its distorted European antisemitic tropes to the filters that has produced the visual history of anti-capitalist resistance in Indonesia! Nevertheless for Germans, the sight of those images in Kassel was too much, a grotesque mirror reflecting their own past, and worst, stripped of the decorating filters of Western liberalism that often adorn the country’s “memory culture.” This is why they reacted with such hyper-allergy, why they moved not only to censor and dismantle the work but to destabilize the institution itself, delaying the next edition, imposing new oversight structures, and effectively re-founding dOCUMENTA under their watch. The circle had closed: the exhibition born to rehabilitate Germany after fascism had hosted images echoing the era’s propaganda.7
But none of this was the result of the artists or the curating team on the ground. The real responsibility lies with the international commission and advisory board that appointed ruangrupa as the artistic directors and themselves as the ongoing advisors to the exhibition-making process, but never accepted their own accountability in the resulting mess. This committee Frances Morris, Amar Kanwar, Philippe Pirotte, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Ute Meta Bauer, Jochen Volz, Charles Esche, Gabi Ngcobo. After making their selection, they did nothing but watch their experiment with decolonial curating unravel, offering only tepid praise or social media cheers when difficulties surfaced. It was this group, not the artists or curators, who engineered the structural failures by appointing themselves as overseers of the exhibition while leaving ruangrupa to take the fall. They are the real scandal, the invisible curatorial elite whose mafia-like relations uphold the global liberal contemporary art order.8
The fallout did not stop at shock. The selection process for dOCUMENTA sixteen became entangled with politics after October 7. In November 2023, members of the Finding Committee resigned, and within days the remaining members quit, citing the lack of conditions in Germany for plural and complex discourse. In July 2024, a new six person finding committee was appointed: Yilmaz Dziewior, Sergio Edelsztein, N’Goné Fall, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Mami Kataoka, and Yasmil Raymond. In December 2024 they named Naomi Beckwith, the Guggenheim’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator, as Artistic Director for dOCUMENTA sixteen. A move pitched as a reset and a guarantor of openness after the debacle, it promised new life but looked, frankly, like corporate planned obsolescence engineered from the ruins of a curatorial collapse.9
Besides, the German regime desperately needs a large coverup beyond saving the nations number one exhibition. Diversity optics are to also shield Germany’s thousand political problems: its unwavering support for Netanyahu and the Gaza war, its police brutality against demonstrators, and its sweeping censorship against anyone who speaks up on Palestine or even the Ukraine war. It also covers up the fact that Berlin caved to Biden’s demand to stop buying cheap Russian gas and is now paying the price by converting the resulting flailing industrial infrastructure into war suppliers. Like Putin, Scholz is radically transforming Germany into having a permanent war economy, keeping privileged German workers employed while forcing the costs onto all of Europe by pressuring EU countries to raise their defense budgets and buy arms from German arms companies. Documenta becomes another screen for this economic-military conversion, a cultural sideshow to distract from Germany’s deeper and darker shades of politics. Here comes Naomi Beckwith the Artistic Director of the upcoming dOCUMENTA!
Before asking, who is she, it is important to mention that Beckwith is being branded by the institution and the art media as the first Black female curator to direct the exhibition. On paper it looks momentous, but in reality it feels like the Kamala Harris’s Groundhug Day: the symbolism of being the first black female, rolled out at the exact moment the institution is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions. Beckwith is positioned well to absorb the failure if the project inevitably falls apart. This is scapegoating dressed up as empowerment and progress. Germany is borrowing the made in Chicago Optical Politics of liberal America invented by Obama in 2008 to cover its own thousands of problems.
A Hyde Park, Chicago native educated at Northwestern and the Courtauld, Beckwith cut her teeth at ICA Philadelphia, then moved to the Studio Museum in Harlem, and from there to the MCA Chicago, where she co organized “The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now,” threading AACM, AfriCOBRA, and the Black Arts Movement into the contemporary canon. Her biography shows significant fluency in two power dialects of Chicago’s Black avant-garde and New York’s donor-led museum machine, making her the perfect emissary for a professional “reset” that keeps the money calm and the headlines tamed.13
Since 2021, Naomi Beckwith has been the Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. However, her ascent at Guggenheim also sits on the debris of the institutions 2019–2020 Basquiat controversy: Chaédria LaBouvier publicly accused the museum (and then–chief curator Nancy Spector) of racism after her exhibition “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story”; Spector resigned in October 2020, after an external investigation found no race-based mistreatment — a result that satisfied no one and left the institution in crisis. Beckwith’s appointment in January 2021 was framed as a reset, and she became the Guggenheim’s first Black deputy director and chief curator. She is also an alum of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP), a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow in the 2002 to 2003 cohort.10 Let’s keep in mind how ISP was suspended for 2025 to 2026 year after the museum canceled a performance about Palestinian mourning by a palestinian cohort, a decision widely decried as censorship by artists, alumni, and press.11 The optics are brutal: dOCUMENTA’s incoming Artistic Director, a proud graduate of a program the Whitney itself paused amid Gaza-related speech crackdowns, is being deployed to cover up Germany’s complicity in the Gaza war via its unconditional support for Israel. The continuity between German cultural “sensitivity” and U.S. institutional control is now structural. It feels like a return to dOCUMENTA’s original Cold War alignment with American foreign policy as a factory reset: not a new beginning, but a managed amnesia, a controlled reboot designed to re-synchronize German culture with Washington’s script.
The most noteworthy line on Beckwith’s CV tells us that her training ran through Harlem’s Studio Museum during Thelma Golden’s reign, where she also served as associate curator before Chicago elevated her profile and the Guggenheim installed her as a successor. She is very fluent in the Studio Museum’s power grammar as the place where, for a generation or two, careers of artists and curators of African descent have been minted or stalled by the determined and brutal Golden who, as a quintessential member of the Black Bourgeoisie sits on the Obama Foundation’s board and has long operated at the junction of art, philanthropy, and politics.[12] Before you get offended, The “black bourgeoisie” refers to a wealthy, upper-class network of African Americans characterized by high incomes and net worth, often holding positions as professionals, executives, celebrities, and entrepreneurs. The term was also the title of a seminal 1957 sociological work by E. Franklin Frazier that critically analyzed this emerging class, noting their adoption of white middle-class values while struggling with identity and societal acknowledgment while using their collective power to chape blackness in the United States. 14
Let us look at the just-announced members of Team Beckwith: Carla Acevedo Yates, Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodriguez Castro, and Xiaoyu Weng. Three of the five have deep Chicago circuitry: Beckwith, Acevedo Yates, and Crawford. Acevedo Yates organized Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s to Today at MCA Chicago. Crawford is a longtime SAIC professor and Black Arts Movement scholar. Rodriguez Castro is the writer, editor of Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews, 1984 to 1992 (Audre Lorde’s European seminars). Xiaoyu Weng, veteran of the Guggenheim’s Robert H. N. Ho Chinese Art Initiative, now curates at the Art Gallery of Ontario. If this team is going to cohere on the page — in concept notes, wall texts, town halls, press briefings — it will be Rodriguez Castro doing the heaviest lifting, not because the others are incompetent, but because in crisis exhibitions, writers make the weather and curators carry umbrellas.15
Let us be honest about labour. While curators swarm to dominate the discussions of art in (social)media, administer and police the red lines, and rehearse their usual performative and self congratulating ethics, the affiliated writers draft the language that lets everyone survive the show and the press cycle. Rodriguez Castro has proven she can translate activist memory into present tense and write through institutions without swallowing euphemisms. In Kassel 2027, that job is going to be a major part of the work.
If you are not already tired of the story, the most concealed part of the documenta cover-up is this: by appointing a diverse, female, African American-led curatorial team, the German art establishment has indirectly affirmed that standing with Israel is a form of necessary evil. It is something to do, but never to acknowledge, and certainly never to celebrate. If those who govern art in Germany were truly convinced that supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism were causes to champion, why did they not appoint an Israeli, or at least a Jewish artistic director after the last edition, now that the government has been supplying Netanyahu with a blank check of political support and diplomatic cover for Israel’s wars? Why instead deploy diversity optics to conceal the fact that Germany stands behind the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a stance that may be treated as political necessity for Western elites, but remains a cultural taboo to either endorse openly or oppose directly?
And here is the larger tragedy. Despite the Nazi fingerprints all over its history, dOCUMENTA once functioned as a forum for progress and humanism. It helped support the post war international order while also helping to expand the research and development of new aesthetics. However compromised and hypocritical, it gave modern and contemporary art room to flourish worldwide through the Cold War, turning artists into global figures and making Kassel a laboratory of the avant garde.
Today, that function is gone. dOCUMENTA has become a blunt tool of geopolitical statecraft, a branch office of the capitalist global empire. To invest so much energy, time, and money into a project that yields no dividends for art or thought is absurd. The only honest response is abolition.
But perhaps, dOCUMENTA deserves a last chance for the sake of African American contemporary art to which the legitimacy of its 15th edition’s artistic director is tied.
African American art has never been granted this scale of international staging. Imagine if Beckwith and her Chicago heavy team decided to frame dOCUMENTA sixteen mainly around African American contemporary practices, not another decolonial guilt parade, but the celebration of a cultural force that has already proven its global impact in diverse fields. Not only a forum to just rehash works by the “Golden certified” giants like Kara Walker, and Kerry James Marshal, but all the other African American artistic and cultural figures whose monumental work has reshaped how the world sees history, race, music, cinema, and essentially a diverse set of black forms. Beckworth and her team have the power to anchor a dOCUMENTA that while staying out of German geopolitics, can finally stage the often hidden structures of the African American grammar of creativity. This way, dOCUMENTA could lead by affirming, not just moralizing.16
Despite all the political baggage they inevitably carry into the space of the exhibition, Good curators and curatorial teams can still surprise us. The physical staging of art, works in space, publics in motion, can exceed our expectations, good or bad. This is the least we can demand from dOCUMENTA for the last time, to renew our faith in art’s capacity to make exhibition making meaningful again. If it cannot even do that, then there is no argument left for its survival. Better to save the money, abolish the institution altogether, and let history close the curtain on Kassel’s spectacle.