Against the Rhetoric of Good Intentions

I went to a talk last week that really got me thinking, but I don’t think it was in the way the speaker intended.

They spoke passionately about their work as a postcolonial scholar and curator. They listed all the right theorists — Sharpe, Hartmann, Moten — and used all the right words: constellations, epistemic, relational, care. Their PowerPoint was sleek, their voice assured, and they spoke with that particular brand of academic certainty that suggests their thoughts existed just slightly above the rest of the room.

But somewhere between the repetition of epistemic [five times in one sentence, if you can believe it] and a self-congratulatory list of the many famous people they’ve worked with, I began to feel that familiar unease.

Because slotted between all the theory and self-mythologising—between the anecdotes of breakdowns and hospitalisations, pseudonymous poetry, and millions raised for charity—there was a single image that refused to sit quietly in the background.

It was a photo of workers sleeping on the floor of a storage warehouse.

This warehouse, they told us, had been built in REDACTED to house a growing art collection. The aside that followed: “it cost much less to build there than it would have in the UK” was offered casually, as though the economics of global inequality could be brushed away with a quip.

NEXT SLIDE. NEXT TOPIC.

But the image lingered in my mind. Why were those workers sleeping there? What were they being paid? How long were their shifts? What does it mean to speak about dreamwork, and ethics, and postcolonial constellations while showing, without comment, the visual evidence of exploitation?

It’s a dissonance I’ve seen play out across the art world, where language has become the most valuable currency. People say the right things. They talk about decolonisation, care, ethics, and collectivity, but the practices beneath these words are often extractive, exclusionary, or simply hollow.

The art world loves to discuss care, but what it means by care is rarely what it actually entails.

The Buzzword of Care

Since around 2020, care has become a kind of talisman—something to invoke when you want to signal sensitivity, progressiveness, or self-awareness. Exhibitions are curated with care, institutions launch care initiatives, and burnout is rebranded as a productivity issue to be solved through mindfulness and better scheduling.

But this isn’t the care that abolitionist thinkers and organisers speak of.

As theorist and curator iLiana Fokianaki observes, the history of care has been shaped by capitalism, colonialism, and modernity. During the Industrial Revolution, care was privatised—removed from the communal and made into a marker of privilege. The wealthy could afford to be well, and wellness became moralised, reframed as a symbol of superiority.

That same logic persists in today’s art world. Care becomes a performance of refinement—a way to signal that one is not just successful but ethically evolved.

Caring for artists or communities becomes a form of branding. Institutions use care rhetorically, not as a practice of mutual responsibility or political kinship, but as a soft aesthetic, an Instagram caption, a way to seem human in a system built on precarity.

Abolitionist care, by contrast, demands refusal—it asks us to dismantle the systems that make care necessary in the first place. It’s not about soothing over harm but addressing it structurally. It’s about collective survival, not individual self-preservation.

And this is precisely where the art world fails.

The Gatekeeping of Ethics

What struck me most about the talk was not the contradiction itself, but how invisible that contradiction seemed to the speaker. They could discuss exploitation while embodying its benefits, could lament the violence of empire while drawing their salary from its legacies.

The art world allows for this because it has become a closed ecosystem where theory substitutes for action, and language shields power from accountability.

Words like care, postcolonial, and ethical have been absorbed into the art market’s vocabulary without altering its structure.

This is what makes it so difficult for those outside the upper echelons to engage meaningfully. The very discourse that claims to dismantle hierarchies often functions to reinforce them. The more abstract and self-referential the language becomes, the more inaccessible the conversation. To speak about ethics in the art world now requires fluency in a coded dialect of academic jargon—one that privileges the educated, the networked, the already-invited.

And so, the cycle continues: the same people—curators, academics, collectors—speak about inclusion while excluding, about decolonisation while reproducing hierarchies, about care while perpetuating burnout and exploitation.

Against the Rhetoric of Good Intentions

What would it mean to stop using care as a performance and start living it as a principle?

Perhaps it would mean refusing to instrumentalise other people’s suffering as evidence of one’s own awareness. Perhaps it would mean slowing down, redistributing resources, or even turning down opportunities that perpetuate the very inequalities we claim to critique.

But this is hard work, and it doesn’t photograph well. It doesn’t fit neatly into artist statements or funding proposals. And so instead, care becomes style—aestheticised into tenderness, sincerity, or relational practice—while remaining structurally absent.

The talk I attended was ALARMINGLY sincere. They truly believed in what they were saying. And maybe that’s the most unsettling part. Because sincerity, when coupled with unexamined privilege, can be just as dangerous as cynicism. It lets people feel ethical without being accountable.

The art world’s crisis isn’t just moral—it’s epistemic. It’s about how knowledge and virtue are performed, who gets to define them, and who is excluded from their expression. When ethics become a language of the elite, they lose their capacity to transform anything at all.

Maybe the most radical act now is not to say the right words, but to stop mistaking words for action.