Art, once the unpredictable guest at the banquet of public life — dancing on tables, spilling wine, quoting Adorno uninvited — has been quietly handed a uniform. Whether in times of pandemic lockdown or geopolitical crisis, the arts, Ripplinger argues, are being pressed into service. No longer autonomous actors on society’s stage, they have become part of the state’s dramaturgy. Curtain up: the artist, too, must now pick a side.
The author’s central claim is that cultural policy has slipped into a kind of soft militarisation, where the lines between independent artistic expression and state-sanctioned messaging are increasingly blurred. This is not simply a tale of state oppression; it is, perhaps more worryingly, one of cultural consent. In a time when social cohesion is prized over social critique, even the boldest murals begin to look suspiciously like public relations.
To make his case, Ripplinger begins with a brisk jog through 20th-century history, where he points out that art has never exactly been left alone to its own devices. From the censorship of the Weimar Republic to the Nazi Gleichschaltung and the Cold War manipulation of modernism, artists have long been squeezed between the poles of resistance and recruitment. Abstract expressionism, for instance, that stormy darling of Western postwar aesthetics, was perhaps less the howl of individual genius than a well-timed cultural counterpoint to Soviet realism — occasionally nudged along, Ripplinger suggests, by intelligence agencies with an eye for a Pollock.
But it is in the 21st century that the machinery truly hums. With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, culture was first declared “non-essential” (a phrase likely to haunt theatre foyers for years to come), only to be rehabilitated shortly after as a salve for collective anxiety. Art was no longer a luxury; it became a kind of emotional infrastructure. Suddenly, artists were expected to cheer us up, keep us company, and not ask too many questions. The velvet rope of the cultural world was replaced by government aid portals. Many artists were grateful. But gratitude, Ripplinger warns, is not the same as freedom.
This period, he argues, marked a turning point: a shift in the way the state sees the arts, not as noisy outsiders but as instruments of public sentiment. What was once marginal became “systemically relevant” again, but under new conditions. To accept funding, one often had to accept the framing. Artistic autonomy was now balanced against responsibility, relevance, and the ever-expanding language of “public good.”
The war in Ukraine further accelerated this transformation. Cultural institutions and artists were expected—sometimes subtly, sometimes bluntly; to express solidarity, and not just in spirit. Artworks, exhibitions, even musical programmes were scrutinised for ideological hygiene. Russian artists found themselves disinvited or quietly removed; those who didn’t take a clear pro-Western stance found fewer platforms open to them. One didn’t need to paint tanks to be part of the war effort, just not painting in the “right” colours could be enough.
The Documenta fifteen exhibition in Kassel serves as a case study in this new cultural climate. What began as an attempt to decentralise and decolonise the artistic canon turned into a media and political firestorm over alleged antisemitism. Ripplinger uses this controversy to expose how quickly the lofty ideals of artistic freedom can be repurposed as instruments of cultural exclusion. What was once a forum for complexity and contradiction became a tribunal for ideological compliance. Freedom of expression, he suggests, is increasingly conditional; on funding, on consensus, on the ambient mood of national politics.
Ripplinger is equally scathing in his analysis of the media, which he sees as having performed a kind of “voluntary self-alignment” during these crises. Critical voices were not always silenced, but often sidelined, especially when they disturbed the narrative symmetry of good versus evil, compliance versus danger. His example of the philosopher Judith Butler, who was publicly maligned for questioning the framing of the Israel–Gaza conflict, illustrates how even academic dissent can become too risky when the drums of war are beating…even metaphorically.
And yet, despite this rather grim landscape, Ripplinger doesn’t suggest that art is doomed to servitude. His final chapter gestures — admittedly more in hope than certainty — towards art’s enduring capacity for unruliness. While much of institutional culture has adapted to the contours of political convenience, he sees sparks of resistance from the Global South, from unaffiliated artists, and from those stubborn enough to reject the idea that art must always “do something useful.” The artist, he reminds us, is never just a citizen in uniform. Even when under pressure, they retain the potential to misbehave, to confound, and, at best, to reveal truths that official language cannot touch.
Still, Ripplinger is aware of the limits of his own framework. His attempt to thread together the pandemic, the Ukraine war, and the Gaza conflict into a single arc of cultural militarisation is ambitious (perhaps too much so). The contexts are wildly different, and he admits as much. Yet he insists that the pattern of state cultural management — the shift from hands-off tolerance to strategic mobilisation — is unmistakable. His sharpest insight lies not in blaming specific institutions, but in diagnosing the mood: a collective turning away from ambiguity, irony, and critique, in favour of clarity, cohesion, and alignment. The muse has not just been summoned; she’s been scheduled, budgeted, and briefed.
The irony, of course, is that all this occurs in a society that prides itself on the freedom of its culture. Ripplinger delights in skewering this contradiction. The much-touted autonomy of Western art, he argues, has always been a little suspect. Even at its most rebellious, it often served ideological ends, as during the Cold War, when CIA-funded exhibitions of abstract art toured the world as proof of Western creative liberty. This, he suggests, is the hidden history behind our cultural self-image: one where freedom is permitted, even celebrated, so long as it serves the right kind of power.
In the end, Art in War reads less like a funeral dirge for artistic freedom and more like a mischievous wake. Ripplinger’s writing is erudite but never ponderous; his arguments are sharp but laced with the kind of exasperated humour that comes from watching your ideals get turned into slogans. What he ultimately offers is not just critique, but a challenge; to artists, to curators, to anyone who still believes that culture can be more than morale.
Because if art is to mean anything in times of war, literal or metaphorical, it must be allowed to disappoint, to complicate, to refuse the standing ovation. Otherwise, we risk turning our concert halls into echo chambers and our museums into war rooms, where even the most radical gestures come pre-approved and pre-funded. In such a world, as Ripplinger dryly suggests, we may still have art — but only the kind that knows how to salute.
This review was originally commissioned for the German-speaking Marxist journal Das Argument. A similar review will be available in print.
Kunst im Krieg: Kulturpolitik als Militisierung
by Stefan Ripplinger
Papy Rossa Verlag
more information here
