A Pussy Riot Comeback

“Wealthy patrons who supported Michelangelo and Bach weren’t trying to make profits. They were in pursuit of artistic greatness.”

Ted Gioia wrote that recently in his annual State of the Art essay. I can sum up his assessment in one word: bad. The condition he describes has reached a stage of near terminal clarity. Online consolidation has rendered the arts, in nearly every form, culturally anemic.

It’s not that art has suddenly fallen under elite control. It always was. Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the Baroque—these were patronage systems run by a small group with wealth and power. The difference is that those elites cared about something beyond money: truth, beauty, immortality, divinity, greatness. They believed art mattered.

Today, art is governed by know-nothing technocrats who don’t give a fig about it. And unlike past patrons, they wield a kind of power over audiences that has never existed before. They decide what you are most likely to see, hear, and encounter. They own attention itself. It sits in your pocket.

This is what the state of the arts looks like when cretins are running the show—and it’s the only show in town.

It connects directly to trump, too: the would-be patron of the Kennedy Center. Art and power have always been intertwined. Every anti-democratic regime—cultural as much as political—targets artists, because art is about free thought and free expression, and nothing threatens power more than that.

None of this should surprise us. The arts have been hemorrhaging mainstream respect for decades. Once, bright and inquisitive minds pursued the arts because it offered the one thing money could not buy: a shot at immortality. You understood why artists would risk everything.

Then we told our children it wasn’t worth it.

Since the 1970s, we’ve steadily devalued the arts in education in favor of STEM. Profit became the only acceptable justification. The arts were framed as indulgent, impractical, unserious—no way to make a living.

And anyway, we were told, it was all bunk. Andy Warhol sealed the deal. He called his studio The Factory, made Brillo boxes, and sold them as art. Maybe it was ironic. But the cultural effect was devastating. Art slid from transcendence into marketplace logic. It became a sales job, an in-joke, or worse—a con.

When cretins, technocrats, and autocrats dominate politics, you can be sure they conquered the art world first.

What’s different now is consolidation. Cultural power has merged with algorithmic gatekeeping. Today’s rulers have found a way to neutralize artists without jailing or repressing them—which only risks turning them into folk heroes. The days of Pussy Riot are gone.

Now the tactic is to flood the zone.

Enrage the audience. Hook them on engagement. Keep them shit-scrolling until they become cultural zombies. Hollow them out until they genuinely believe a robot can write a song and sing it. At that point, the audience becomes part of the machine.

Is there any hope of breaking free?

There has always been a counterculture. Underground venues. Physical spaces. Real communities. Usually fueled by young people who hadn’t yet been fully indoctrinated, who rejected their parents’ values and had no stake in the status quo.

So where are the counterculture clubs now? Online.

Which is to say: nowhere. No real clubs. No real community. No real counterculture.

The techno-oligarchs have effectively operationalized the maxim attributed to Aristotle and Ignatius Loyola: “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” The “man,” in this case, is a servile cultural imbecile.

I’ll never say it’s over until it’s over. The human spirit has never been fully broken.

I’m still hoping for a Pussy Riot comeback.