Standing in a newly renovated industrial gallery in Bushwick—where the crowd looks like a billboard for big city youth—I watch them perform their standard ritual: snap, post, caption something smug, then move along to the next piece. Another installation accompanied by a full-on essay on the wall making sure you never misunderstand its purpose—like the one from the 2022 Whitney Biennial, where a piece by Alfredo Jaar depicting a decaying American flag came with an explanation that read, “This work critiques the decline of democratic values in contemporary America.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Jaar's work, and I'm sure this fuck-up is more the curator's fault than his. But there was no room left for interpretation, just a blunt directive to absorb the ‘correct’ lesson before moving on. The curators have made it clear: we must know exactly what to think. The notion that a viewer could handle ambiguity or discover meaning on their own is an alien concept now.

There was a time when stepping into an art museum or gallery space meant entering the unknown. Low expectations for maximum result. Consider Cady Noland’s work in the ’90s: cobbling together metal barricades, beer cans, and newspaper clippings, she never spelled it out. Was it about violence, celebrity, Americana gone rotten? You decided. Today, you’d get a side text explaining, “This installation critiques corporate control and systemic injustices in everyday life,” as if the audience might otherwise miss the point and think it’s somehow racist. The art world’s trust in its viewers has withered away.

Look at performance art. Decades ago, Chris Burden shot himself in the arm as a piece, shocking audiences with a raw confrontation of violence and vulnerability. It blurred the lines between performance, self-sacrifice, and spectacle. There was no explanation—just the unsettling immediacy of the act—forcing viewers to grapple with their own interpretations and discomfort. No gift-wrapped nonsense. You left unsettled, forced to reckon with your own interpretations. Now, whenever someone crawls through a city street or stages a grueling endurance piece, there’s a multi-paragraph statement informing you which social issue is being addressed, ensuring you leave with a predetermined conclusion. The drama of personal interpretation is replaced by a sanitized moral lesson.

Even the small galleries, they used to dare you to be confused, now they have capitulated. They used to show opaque video loops, cryptic sculptures, and bizarre installations that refused to be coherent. You’d leave feeling disoriented or intrigued, caught in a tension that made the experience unforgettable. Like Bunny Rogers’ early installations. She’d invoke digital subcultures, traumas, and memorial sites, but never settle on a single, spoon-fed narrative. You had to do the heavy lifting, making connections and feeling uneasy as you pieced it together. Now, her imitators and much of the scene produce shows that arrive with interpretive guides, dictating meanings so rigidly they leave no room for curiosity or doubt. The labels practically command, “This is trauma. This is systemic oppression. Empathize accordingly. Or else…” Think of the 2021 New Museum exhibition "Grief and Grievance," where even powerful pieces by Kara Walker and Arthur Jafa came preloaded with exhaustive explanations as if the work itself couldn’t be trusted to convey meaning without a textual escort.

Survey exhibitions—like a Whitney Biennial or a New Museum Triennial— honestly were once were amazing. You might stumble over something that makes you question your assumptions. But reducing important messages from the artists to slogans? Come on, stop treating us like stupid children. The friction and complexity that once made such shows thrilling has been flattened into a guided tour, and in a sense, it kind of feels like scrolling through a feed on IG—endlessly curated, perfectly packaged, and designed for immediate consumption. The feed mentality teaches us to skim rather than engage, to seek instant gratification instead of grappling with ambiguity. Just as social media reduces complex lives to bite-sized posts, these exhibitions reduce layered ideas to simple captions, reducing us to passive consumers rather than engaged interpreters.

Thank heavens for a few holdouts who still respect the viewer. Anicka Yi’s installations assault your nose with microbial and chemical fragrances that can’t be captured in a neat caption. Tony Cokes overwhelms you with contradictory texts, leaving you no single path to follow. David Hammons remains elusive, refusing to clarify his moves, trusting that seriousness and confusion can coexist. Artists like these acknowledge that meaning is not something you’re handed. That struggle is the process that deepens your understanding.

At its best, art demands we work for insight. Today’s market, hungry for digestible moral clarity and instant relevance, has gone the other way. Complexity is treated like a barrier to entry rather than the whole point. They fear scaring you off from buying tickets with anything too uncertain, so they package every piece with an instruction manual. But that kills the magic. If you never experience the moment of not knowing, you never build the muscle to interpret, challenge, or even disagree. What’s left to discuss after the show with your friends?

Art’s power is lessened when adapted to the rattling off the party line (a gallery these days would have to paus and explain, “in this case, the donors, and patrons are the party”). It should be inviting us into strange territories. Without that sense of personal discovery, art becomes a glorified TEDTalk, a set of displays we consume and nod at, rather than something we wrestle with.

I long for exhibitions that trust me to think for myself, that leave me puzzled and even uncomfortable. Let the audience squirm, let them argue, let them misunderstand. In that friction lies real engagement. Right now, too much art is so morally and intellectually over-explained that it stops feeling like art and starts feeling like a public service announcement.

Until the pendulum swings back, I’ll wander these supposed “alternative” spaces, like the MOCO in Amsterdam, observing the crowds who dutifully absorb each ready-made explainer. But maybe there's hope if curators and artists can resist the urge to over-explain, trusting that ambiguity isn’t a weakness but an invitation. Give us the nasty, the strange, the unresolved—and let the audience rebuild their interpretive muscles. Only then can these spaces become places of discovery again.