The Virtue of Instability

by Bill Lasarow

December 24, 2025

Doris Salcedo, “Installation at 8th International Istanbul Biennial,” 2003, 1,550 wooden chairs. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

The Art World is by its very nature unstable, and in that lies much of its value and strength. It thrives on its dual handmaidens, individuality and freedom. If creative originality is a simple ideal, novelty and eccentricity mark its charming failure. It is not consistent with democratic governance, which is better left to lawyers and bean counters. In a sense it is a closer sibling to the Fascist Party of America and its family-driven racketeering because they both are driven by an impulse to transcend convention and law. It pretty much ends there, as art is in good part a search for ethos despite the knowledge that final answers are not forthcoming. The power of art comes from the liberation fostered by free expression and the exercise of imagination. The power of fascism (and crime in general) is a small-minded pursuit of advantage and the false (not to mention fleeting) comfort of material gain.

Sarah Sze, “Slice,” 2023, multimedia installation, 15’ 5” x 21’ 2” x 27’. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo: David Heald.

In typical mafia family, yes such as that of Trump34, you extract an oath of loyalty that is not returned. To such people that is real power. In the moral universe that is mere corruption, and it is small no matter the façade, the brittle shell of power or wealth. In the aesthetic realm it is even worse: the absence of integrity. That doesn’t mean that we, as artists, turn to progressive political leaders because they know the right answers to managing a mass society. In fact, that is not the reason for the near universal liberalism of artists (the few exceptions tend to be more extreme in their ideologies). It’s that conservatism in its common form is simply too restrictive of individual conduct. When the old Republican Party conservatism transforms into fascism, controlling social norms are enforced by increasing coercion and violence. What we think of as First Amendment rights suddenly come only with a pledge of loyalty that utterly negates the necessary condition of creativity. When only one form of speech is permitted, no speech is free.

Alan Rath, “Vanity,” 1992, vintage medicine cabinet, aluminum, custom electronics, CRT, 48 x 44 x 25”. Courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.

Progressive leaders must be fired up by public service and self-sacrifice. There is an obvious satisfaction in the social amplification that this implies, and it is a far more wholesome exercise of power, the exercise of public benefit and honest collaboration within a sprawling organization. Politicians, be they progressive of fascist, must necessarily deal with the real world of many interests, of lots of individuals coming and going, of change as a constant. The art world deals with a unique commodity — namely creativity, as distinct from the artwork or performance per se. God forbid when any organization should get it claws into that commodity, as so frequently happens. This is a great argument to keep the art world small. The freedom is more likely to be unencumbered by the lack of material reward. For many, perhaps most, and maybe nearly all real artists that will be met with a sigh of relief. In progressive politics the goal is to establish a solid floor of stability and affluence, and that provides enough space for creativity to thrive.

In post-war America and much of the rest of the modern world it has thrived for the last century in a way that it never has before, the long history of elite art notwithstanding.

Louise Bourgoise, “Janus Fleuri,” 1968, bronze and gold patina, 10 1/8 × 12 1/2 × 8 3/8”. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Photo: Christopher Burke. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York.

I’m personally a born liberal because I reject the racist, xenophobic wing of any political party precisely because it is exclusionary by intent, by emotion, and by policy. My creed is that the continuing growth of inclusion, I might say the relentless expansion of middle-class confidence, is the correct aspiration. The validity of that aspiration strikes me as plain as day when you read America’s founding documents in their plain language. That the last several generations bear this truth is made evident by the many thousands of professional creatives alive today. Only a few depended on the kind of privilege that enabled dedicated creativity, or the exposure to suffering and deprivation that those who were creative by their nature were usually forced to endure.

When the Founders rejected the millennias-long model of a monarch enthroned by God, which Washington then certified in practice when he rejected the title, they only had the vaguest of intuitions as to where that would lead. If the Civil War and the current ownership of the federal government by a mafia operation represents the two lowest points in our still young 250-year-old experiment, we have also enjoyed long periods of advancement.

Christian Boltanski, “It’s a jumble out there,” 2010, multimedia installation. Courtesy of the Grand Palais, Paris. Photo: Didier Plowy.

With the conclusion of 30 years of war during the first half of the 20th-century, and the needless loss of over 130 million live and the disruption of hundreds of millions of others, much of the 19th century’s most durable infrastructure lay in ruins. A gleaming new America fortuitously, but not accidentally, stood very tall for the balance of the 20th century and into the 21st. It was a formula that had worked, was working, and with seriousness of purpose on both sides it would have continued to steer us toward that better future that most of us wish for. Looking back of the last century, the expansion of art, of all creative culture, of its sheer breadth of creative product, along with an economic infrastructure to support it, is unsurprising. And yet it is a new thing in the tale of civilization.

Ori Gersht, “Flower 02 (Rijiksmuseum),” 2021, photographs, archival pigment print, 46 1/2 x 35”. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson, New York.

Suddenly, in 2025, we are supposed to forget about the Founder’s ideas about personal liberty and freedom and be “nice” to a fascist mafia boss? I ain’t doin’ it, and I do not know anyone in the art world that I have worked in for five decades who does. Yet here we all are, by virtue of this product of deceit and the worst kind of self-aggrandizing greed. Our own votes put us here, we were not forced. Now that we are here, the best we can do is bend the destruction towards another new renaissance. Many previous generations have borne the same burden, we are only unique in terms of what has been given up in relative terms. There will come a future that regards our miracles as in fact quite modest.

You can’t script history, it writes itself. You can script after history and noodle around it as much as you like. Enter the creativity of art and all of its related discourse and conversation.

If you choose the best tasting among ten brands of mustard, you are more likely to truly enjoy your choice than if you just accept the basic yellow stuff as good enough to reach no further. I deal, and have dealt with a large number of creative people as a tenet of my art and publishing career. To people like me, the question of which among ten landscape paintings or sculptural figures are the best, rather than the first one you see that is competently painted, carved, or assembled is vital. Inclusion in a field free of distraction, let along catastrophe, itself is not the answer but a necessary condition to raise important questions and to speculate.

Paula Rego, “The Family,” 1988, acrylic on paper on canvas, 84 x 84”. Courtesy of the Tate, London.

The question was once raised, and widespread discussion resulted from the question: Why are there no great women artists? The answer was in effect: well, have at it. The conditions existed for women to seize opportunities that have grown exponentially, and the talent pool just naturally enlarged to fill many exhibition halls. Today the late Linda Nochlin’s question, half-a-century ago so impertinent and so bold, has been obliterated. Thank goodness, due to women’s inclusion, and that of so many others, it is the freedom of creativity that won. And so, like the Republic itself, now that we have it … can we keep it?

Bill Lasarow, Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (1987); and Visual Art Source (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain. In 2025 he relaunched SquareCylinder with co-publishers Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.