The Cult of the Medium – When Process Becomes Propaganda

There's a growing seduction in the art world: not of meaning, but of method. A fascination not with what the work says but rather how it was made, where it was shown, and which tools were touched.

Process shading purpose. Provenance masquerading as profoundity. And beneath this shift lies a quiet betrayal, the rise of the medium as message, and the death of the message itself. The medium surpasing the message and meaning. That old, unruly thing has been politely escorted out.

We are witnessing the birth of a cult. The Cult of the Medium.

Its rituals are clean, its members fluent in terms like process, materiality, scale, and installation. They speak of fabrication as though it were philosophy. Tracing lineage not of thought, but of format. Who printed this? Who cast it? What archive was sampled?

But what did it say? That question has become almost vulgar. In The Cult of the Medium, meaning is gauche. Emotion is a liability and moral urgency is dismissed as intellectual poverty.

Message is now an afterthought; the wshipser left behind the curators have applauded the techniques. Feeling too much is amateur, Caring too openly is naive. And to seek purpose in the work is to reveal oneself as unfashionably sincere.

We are told that it is immature to expect art to confront us, to move us, to demand something of our conscience. That to seek clarity in a work is to reveal our provincialism. Ambiguity, they say, is the greatest form of intelligence, even when it makes nothing but vacancy. And thus, to feel is to be unsophisticated. To ask is to be uncultured. To want something human is to be disqualified from the conversation altogether. But this ambiguity is not born of mystery. It is manufactured detachment.

And detachment in this age is not neutrality. Its propaganda.

Because the world is burning. Children are dying. The soil is sick. The animals are fleeing. The corpses are rising into view. And to respond to this with a perfectly lit, materially intricate sculpture about nothing is not apolitical. It is alignment. It is complicity dressed as cleverness. An aesthetic of avoidance masquerading as taste. To create beauty without consciousness is not neutrality. It is indulgence gilded in theory.

It is the same logic that drives war photography without war commentary. That sells t-shirts with protest slogans as print design. That praises the beauty of decay but never names the hand that shattered the frame. Aesthetic without indictment. Form without fidelity. These are not accidents of restraint. They are rehearsals of complicity. To romanticize collapse while refusing to confront its architects is not art. It is cowardice curated.

In this sense, the Cult of the Medium is not just hollow. It is dangerous.

It teaches the next generation to feel is a faux pas. To care if provincial and to name the system is not bravery, but bad form. Passion is recast as poor tast. Conscience as career sabatogre, and thus the academy births elegance without marrow.

And slowly, it replaces the artist with the artisan. The witness with the technician. The thinker with the trademark.

This is not to say the medium is irrelevant, only that when the process becomes more sacred than the purpose. When a project is funded, published, and performed for its cleverness rather than its conviction, we have entered a new kind of propaganda. Polished. Prestigious. Empty.

And like all cults, it worships what can be repeated not what can be risked. Some of us still want art that bleeds. That speaks. That interrupts. Not because we fear technique but because we remember its purpose. Art was never meant to be a product of prestige. It was meant to be a wound, carried across time for the sake of those who could not speak for themselves.

Museum of One — Written at the Threshold, 2025