I. The Dust and the Light

There is a specific quality of light that exists only in the Arsenale in late afternoon: a dusty, golden suspension that catches the motes of history floating in the damp air. It is the light of a cathedral after the faithful have left, or perhaps before they have arrived. Standing there last autumn, amidst the lingering humidity of the Venetian lagoon, I found myself paralyzed not by a political provocation, nor by a curatorial thesis on the post-human condition, but by a sensation I had been trained, for the better part of three decades, to distrust.

I was standing before a painting. It does not matter which one, though it happened to be a large, vibrating canvas that seemed to hold the chaotic energy of a thousand cities suspended in amber. What matters is the reaction. It was not an intellectual acknowledgment of the work's "discursive framework." It was not a polite nod to its "critique of neoliberal urbanism." It was a physical arrest. A sudden, sharp intake of breath. A slowing of the pulse. A feeling of being pinned to the floor by the sheer, unmediated visual power of the object.

I found it beautiful.

And immediately, following that rush of pleasure, came the reflex of guilt.

We were taught, somewhere between the austere minimalism of the 1970s and the didactic rigors of the early 2000s, that pleasure was a distraction. We learned to be suspicious of the retina. If an artwork seduced the eye, the logic went, it was likely picking the pocket of the mind. To stand before a canvas and simply swoon, to allow the sheer, optical rush of color and form to bypass the critical faculties, was to surrender to the decorative, the easy, the unserious.

For fifty years, we have operated under the grim assumption that for art to be "important," it must also be difficult. It should resist us. It should be dry, archival, and preferably accompanied by a wall text that reads like a dissertation on late-stage capitalism. We replaced the vocabulary of aesthetics with the vocabulary of the autopsy: we did not "view" art, we "interrogated" it. We did not find it "moving," we found it "problematic." Beauty was left to the fashion magazines and the luxury goods market. It was not for us, the thinkers, the worriers, the serious people mapping the geopolitical fractures of our time.

But why? When did we decide that the eye and the brain were enemies? When did we decide that the sensation of delight was incompatible with the sensation of justice?

II. The Architecture of Suspicion

To understand why this return to beauty is so radical in 2026, we must first understand the architecture of our suspicion. We did not banish beauty because we hated it; we banished it because we feared it.

The twentieth century taught us that beauty could be a mask. We looked at the propaganda of totalitarian regimes—the heroic realism, the perfected bodies, the symphonic order—and we saw how beauty could be weaponized to sell terrible lies. We saw how the market could take the radical energy of the avant-garde and smooth it down into harmless decoration for a corporate lobby. We saw the "beautification" of cities that really meant the displacement of the poor. Beauty became synonymous with complicity.

In response, the art world retreated into a kind of monastic severity. We embraced what Hal Foster memorably called the "Anti-Aesthetic." We championed the abject, the chaotic, the dematerialized. We built a fortress of theory to protect ourselves from the seduction of the visual. This was a necessary correction, a way of insisting that art had work to do beyond providing optical pleasure. We demanded that art tell the truth, and since the truth of the twentieth century was often ugly, we decided that art must be ugly too.

The Whitney Biennial of 1993 became the crucible of this logic. When Robert Hughes dismissed it as "a fiesta of whining" and Michael Kimmelman condemned its "self-righteous politics," what they were really objecting to was not poor quality but category confusion: the exhibition's refusal to separate aesthetic experience from political reality, beauty from justice, form from content. The Biennial's crime was that it insisted art could matter in ways that exceeded pleasure. What followed was decades of exhibitions where that insistence hardened into orthodoxy.

Prettiness is easy. Prettiness confirms what you already know. It asks nothing of you; it merely flatters your eye. It is the sunset filter on a photo app; it is the perfectly plated meal; it is the algorithmically smoothed face. Prettiness is designed to be consumed and forgotten. It is friction-free.

The beauty we are interested in—the beauty that has haunted the halls of this publication since the beginning—is the beauty that disrupts. It is the Sublime in the old, terrifying Romantic sense: the feeling of standing before a storm, or a mountain, or a truth so vast it makes you feel small. This kind of beauty does not soothe; it shakes. It is the "terrible beauty" that Yeats wrote of, born of violence and transformation.

By banishing this power, we unilaterally disarmed ourselves. We created an art world that spoke only to itself, in a language of coded signals, leaving the wider public—the very public we claim to want to engage—standing outside the door, wondering why everything looked so much like homework. We forgot that the human animal is wired for awe. We forgot that before we are political subjects, before we are economic units, we are sensory beings. We navigate the world through touch, sight, and sound. To deny the power of the aesthetic is to surrender the most potent tool we have for communication.

III. The Great Exhaustion and the Economy of Attention

But here is the news from the front lines of 2026: The fever is breaking.

As we survey the current landscape of the biennale ecosystem—that sprawling, chaotic, magnificent archipelago of exhibitions that defines our cultural calendar, from Liverpool to Sharjah—something fundamental has shifted. We are witnessing a return to the aesthetic, but not as a retreat. The beauty emerging from the studios of Accra, the collectives of Jakarta, and the lofts of Brooklyn is not the easy, frictionless beauty of a screensaver. It is something heavier. It is beauty with teeth.

Why now? Why, after decades of severity, are we seeing a resurgence of lushness, of craft, of the "retinal"?

I believe it is a direct response to the Great Exhaustion.

We are living in an attention economy that has reached a terminal velocity. Our days are fragmented by the relentless ping of notifications, the infinite scroll of the feed, the constant, low-level hum of anxiety generated by the twenty-four-hour news cycle. We are over-informed and under-moved. We see images of atrocity and images of luxury side-by-side on our screens, separated only by a swipe of the thumb. In this digital slurry, images lose their weight. They become ghost-images, sliding past us without leaving a mark.

In this context, the austere, dry, documentary-style art of the early 2000s—the art that presented us with facts and archives—has lost its efficacy. We have enough facts. We are drowning in facts. What we lack is the capacity to feel them.

Real beauty—complex, material, demanding beauty—stops the scroll. It acts as a speed bump for the eye. When you stand before a painting that vibrates with color, or a sculpture that demands to be circled, your metabolic rate slows down. You are forced to enter the time of the object, rather than imposing your time upon it. This is what The Biennale Book describes as "the human residue": the slight asymmetry of a hand-thrown vase, the indelible trace of a human nervous system, the evidence of care. In a world saturated by the frictionless output of the algorithm, this residue has become the new aura.

This is why the "tactile turn" is so prevalent in the current biennale cycle. We are seeing a massive resurgence of ceramics, of weaving, of heavy impasto painting: things that insist on their physical reality. In a world of smooth glass screens and cloud storage, the clunky, heavy presence of a physical object is a radical proposition. It reminds us that we have bodies. It grounds us.

The return to beauty is not an escape from reality; it is a strategy for enduring it. It is the only force strong enough to arrest our attention and hold it long enough for a seed of meaning to be planted. We have realized that we cannot scold the world into caring. We have to seduce it.

IV. The Geopolitics of Delight

There is another, perhaps more uncomfortable reason why the West, specifically, turned its back on beauty: we had the luxury of cynicism.

In the comfortable capitals of the Global North, it became intellectually fashionable to deconstruct beauty, to expose it as a lie. But as the biennale ecosystem has truly globalized—as the center of gravity has shifted toward São Paulo, Gwangju, Sharjah, and Havana—we have been forced to confront a different perspective.

In many parts of the Global South, beauty has never been viewed as a bourgeois luxury or a deceptive mask. It has been viewed as a mechanism of resilience. It is a way of asserting dignity in the face of poverty or oppression. To create something beautiful when you are surrounded by ugliness is not an act of denial; it is an act of defiance. It is a way of saying: I am still here. I can still create. You cannot take this from me.

Its core ethos privileged process over product, community engagement over individual genius, and political critique over aesthetic contemplation. But critically, it never asked artists to abandon beauty in service of critique. It understood that for communities under siege, the act of making something beautiful is itself a political statement.

And as we look at the histories of events like the Sharjah Biennial—a postcolonial laboratory in an emirate of exchange—we see a refusal to separate the political from the aesthetic. Sharjah's achievement has been to demonstrate that South-South dialogue can generate sophisticated discourse without Northern mediation, that alternative modernities are not just possible but necessary. The Biennial has proven that major international exhibitions can thrive outside Western capitals, building infrastructure rather than merely staging spectacle.

This lesson is finally reaching the institutions of the West. We are learning that joy is not the opposite of seriousness. We are learning that color is not the enemy of concept. We are learning that, as the writer Toni Morrison once suggested, beauty is not a distraction from the political; it is, in the hands of the oppressed, a revolutionary act.

The Whitney Biennial itself has come to understand this. The 1995 edition, curated by Klaus Kertess, emphasized painting and beauty as healing antidotes to the previous edition's abrasiveness. This "return to beauty" was itself political, suggesting that aesthetic pleasure might serve progressive ends better than didactic messaging. The lesson took decades to fully absorb, but it has finally arrived.

V. The View from the Estuary: São Paulo and Venice

Let us move from the philosophical to the concrete, for the biennale is nothing if not a collection of specific things in specific rooms. How does this "new beauty" manifest in the ecosystem of 2026?

We see it most clearly in the guiding philosophies of this year's major events. Consider the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, stretching into 2026 under the curatorial guidance of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. The exhibition is organized around a title drawn from Afro-Brazilian poet Conceição Evaristo: "Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice." Ndikung proposes humanity not as a fixed category but as something that must be actively constructed and maintained.

At the heart of his vision lies the metaphor of the estuary—that murky, fertile zone where fresh and salt water mix. Ndikung speaks of "humanity as practice." He is not interested in the sterile, white-cube separation of art from life. He is interested in the mess, the flow, the abundance. In the estuary, things are not clean. They are teeming. And the art emerging from this worldview refuses the binary between the political and the beautiful. It insists that joy is a political emotion. It argues that the sheer aesthetic abundance of a carnival costume or a painted facade is a weapon against the gray bureaucracy of colonial control.

This expanded notion of who and what counts as a participant in culture reflects the influence of Indigenous cosmologies that have long been present in Brazilian thought but often marginalized in its major cultural institutions.

Similarly, looking toward the Venice Biennale of 2026, we see a shift toward what the late curator Koyo Kouoh described as "In Minor Keys." When Kouoh was announced as curator—the first African woman to hold the position—she introduced a radical proposition. If the early 2000s were about the "Mega-Biennale," the blockbuster exhibition, the giant sculpture that looks good on Instagram, the loud statement, then 2026 feels like the year of the whisper.

"We have confused visibility with value," Kouoh argued. "The major keys of global art—scale, shock, clear messaging—have their place. But the minor keys, the subtle frequencies, the quiet insurrections: these too deserve our attention."

This is not about smallness in size, but in tone. It is an appreciation for the subtle, the quiet, the internal. It is a rebellion against the scream. The 2026 edition, being realized by her curatorial team posthumously following Kouoh's unexpected death in May 2025, promises to test whether such subtle recalibration is possible within the biennale's inherently spectacular framework. It is a beautiful proposition, and a brave one.

VI. The Alchemists of the Residue

How does this manifest in the work itself? It appears, primarily, as a story about alchemy. One of the most profound shifts we track at Biennale.com is the "Material Turn": the way artists are looking at the detritus of our global supply chains and asking, "Can this be redeemed?"

Consider the enduring relevance of El Anatsui, whose work remains a touchstone for this generation. By now, his hanging sculptures are icons, shimmering like gold cloth in the world's great museums. But we must never stop looking at what they are. The "gold" is not metal mined from the earth; it is the discarded caps of liquor bottles, the refuse of a trade history that links Europe, Africa, and the Americas in a triangle of exploitation.

He applies thousands of hours of labor—what Ndikung might call "humanity as practice"—to stitch these scraps into a tapestry that commands the same reverence as a Byzantine mosaic. He is selling the West back its own trash, but packaged as its highest value: high art. He is saying that beauty is not intrinsic to the material; it is a byproduct of care. If you care for something enough—even a bottle cap—it becomes beautiful. This is "transformative patience." It is a proposition that redemption is possible, even for the most discarded things.

We see this same alchemy in the work of Firelei Báez, whose presence has become essential to the contemporary dialogue. Her paintings are riots of color: turquoise, fuchsia, indigo. They feature female figures from Caribbean folklore, shape-shifting and unruly. But look at the substrate. She works on top of colonial maps and architectural diagrams, the dry, precise documents used to control land and bodies.

Báez does not burn the maps. She drowns them in beauty. She unleashes a chromatic insurrection, burying the logic of control under the logic of joy. The figure overflows the boundaries of the map, her hair and dress erupting into patterns that reference botany, cosmos, and ocean. This is beauty as a political weapon. She is asserting that the messy, colorful, chaotic reality of lived experience is stronger than the rigid lines of the border patrol. She seduces the eye to liberate the territory.

And consider the quiet power of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. In a visual culture that often demands Black bodies perform either extreme trauma or superhuman excellence, her figures do something radical: they relax. They sit in shadowy rooms, holding cups of coffee, looking at birds, or simply staring into the middle distance. They are painted with a loose, confident brushwork that feels timeless, indebted to Manet or Goya but entirely modern.

In a noisy world, Yiadom-Boakye's quietness is deafening. It forces the viewer to slow down, to lean in, to wonder what the figure is thinking. It reclaims the right to a private life, a private beauty, amidst the public storm.

VII. The Solar Noir and the Terrible Beauty

Finally, there is the beauty that hurts. We must talk about the weather.

The climate crisis is the backdrop of every conversation in 2026, and for a long time, art struggled to address it. How do you paint an apocalypse? The early attempts were often grim: photos of melting glaciers, sculptures made of plastic harvested from the Pacific garbage patch. They were virtuous, but they were often ugly, and they made us feel helpless.

Now, a new aesthetic is emerging: a "Solar Noir," a beauty that acknowledges the end of things.

Think of John Akomfrah, whose films have become the conscience of the biennale circuit. When you stand before a work like Vertigo Sea, you are not initially hit with a political argument. You are hit with the sublime. You see the Arctic ocean, vast and terrifyingly blue; you see the breaching of a whale, shot with the high-definition grandeur of a BBC documentary.

The sheer visual pleasure of the image pins you to the spot. It mimics the language of cinema, of advertising, of the spectacular. And it is only then, once you are captivated, that Akomfrah springs the trap. He layers in the history of the whaling industry, the slaughter of the hunt, and then, devastatingly, the bodies of migrants crossing the Mediterranean.

If Akomfrah had simply shown us grainy news footage of tragedy, we might have turned away—we have "compassion fatigue," after all. But by wrapping the tragedy in the cloak of the sublime, he forces us to look. He uses beauty to make the unbearable bearable, just long enough for it to register. This is the Trojan Horse method of aesthetics: the exterior dazzles so the interior can invade.

We saw this too in the legendary Lithuanian Pavilion of 2019, Sun & Sea (Marina), which reverberates still. An opera set on an indoor beach, viewed from above. It was visually delightful: pastel bathing suits, the soft murmur of singing, the banal loveliness of a summer holiday. But the lyrics were about ecological collapse. The singers crooned about plastic in the ocean, about rising temperatures, about the slow catastrophe unfolding beneath the surface of leisure.

The contrast between the gentle, lulling beauty of the scene and the horror of the text created a cognitive dissonance that was far more effective than any protest sign. It implicated us. It showed us that we are singing while the world burns, and that our singing is still beautiful. Viewers looked down from above like absent gods, watching humanity leisurely approach apocalypse. The work's gentle beauty—soft songs, relaxed bodies, warm light—made its environmental message more disturbing than any direct representation of catastrophe. Its Golden Lion victory confirmed a shift toward collective and performative practices at Venice.

This is why beauty matters now more than ever. In an age of catastrophe, only the beautiful has the power to make us stop long enough to feel.

VIII. The Tactile Turn: Earth, Water, Body

And so we come to the body, and to the earth.

The Toronto Biennial and the Andorra Land Art Biennial have turned heavily toward the tactile. We are exhausted by screens. We crave the mud, the clay, the shoreline. We want art that gets its hands dirty.

Toronto's biennial, from its inaugural edition, took the bold approach of starting with the land itself: specifically the shoreline of Lake Ontario, which has witnessed centuries of Indigenous presence, colonial violence, industrial development, and environmental transformation. As curator Candice Hopkins, a member of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation, explained: "We began by acknowledging that we were working on Indigenous land that had never been ceded, and that any meaningful engagement with this place needed to start from that understanding."

Rather than concentrating artworks in a central pavilion, the Toronto Biennial dispersed projects across multiple sites spanning the city's forty-six-kilometer waterfront. This distributed approach invited audiences to experience the city anew through artistic interventions. The 2022 edition, titled "What Water Knows, The Land Remembers," expanded the geographic scope inland along Toronto's ravine systems and waterways while continuing to center Indigenous knowledge. There is beauty here, but it is not the beauty of spectacle. It is the beauty of attention paid to what was always there.

The Andorra Land Art Biennial, under the leadership of ecological artist Martí Boada Juncà, embraced a radical vision: art that made visible the invisible ecological processes that sustain mountain environments. Works consisted of hundreds of tiny mirrors placed among wildflowers, reflecting sunlight in ways that traced the invisible patterns of pollinating insects. Sound installations amplified the underground movement of water through mountain soil.

This is not art that imposes itself on nature. It is art that reveals nature to itself, and to us. It asks us to slow down, to look closely, to remember that we are embedded in systems far larger and more complex than our screens would have us believe.

In a world that desperately needs new models for how we might live together, these experiments in sustained attention and radical openness feel less like art exhibitions and more like survival strategies for the species.

IX. Who Owns Beauty?

And so we arrive at the question that haunts this column, the question we will return to again and again in the months to come: Who owns beauty?

For too long, beauty was monopolized. It belonged to the wealthy, who could afford to surround themselves with beautiful objects. It belonged to the powerful, who used it to legitimate their authority. It belonged to the colonizers, who defined what beauty was and was not, who relegated the aesthetic traditions of the colonized to the categories of "craft" or "folk art" or "primitive." It belonged to the market, which priced beauty out of reach and turned it into an asset class.

But beauty, like water, finds its way through cracks.

What we are seeing in 2026 is a reclamation. Artists from every corner of the globe are asserting their right to the beautiful—not on terms dictated by Paris or New York, but on their own terms. They are insisting that the aesthetic is not a luxury that must wait until the political work is done, but a tool for doing that work. They are demonstrating that beauty can coexist with criticality, that pleasure can coexist with politics, that local knowledge can coexist with global circulation.

The Biennale Book speaks of spaces "where beauty and criticality, pleasure and politics, local knowledge and global circulation can coexist productively." This is the wager biennales repeatedly make: that gathering to look at things humans have made might still change something. It is an absurd wager in many ways—expensive, inefficient, often pretentious. It is also a necessary one.

Because the alternative—surrendering cultural space entirely to market logic and algorithmic sorting—represents a kind of spiritual defeat from which recovery might prove impossible.

X. The Verdict

So, where does this leave us, the readers of Biennale.com? Where does it leave the policy wonks, the collectors, the historians, and the lovers of culture who come to this platform?

It leaves us with a responsibility.

We need to stop apologizing for our hunger for beauty. We need to recognize that in a world that is increasingly functional, transactional, and polarized, the act of seeking out the beautiful is an act of resistance. It is a rejection of the idea that life is merely about survival or efficiency. It is an assertion that we are creatures of the senses, and that we deserve to be moved.

When you walk through the next biennale—whether it is in the humid heat of the Amazonian delta or the grey light of Liverpool—do not just look for the "smart" art. Do not just look for the art that agrees with your politics or confirms your anxieties. Do not look for the footnotes.

Look for the moment when the "art world" falls away, and you are left with just the world itself, refracted through the lens of a singular human consciousness.

That sensation? That arrest? That sudden intake of breath?

That is not a distraction. That is the fuel. That is the human residue asserting itself against the machine. That is the question of beauty, asking you, politely but firmly, to wake up.

Legacy Russell, the curator and writer, argues that biennales serve as "temporary autonomous zones": spaces where different rules apply, where value is not only monetary, where success is not only quantifiable. "For seven months," she writes, "an entire city agrees to prioritize looking at art. That's not nothing. That's everything."

She is right. And we are here to document it, to argue about it, and yes, to enjoy it.

Because if we cannot find beauty in the wreckage, then the wreckage has truly won.

This column, "The Question of Beauty," is my attempt to map that territory. Each month, we will look at how beauty is being reclaimed, contested, and reimagined across the global biennale circuit. We will ask uncomfortable questions. We will celebrate works that move us. We will refuse the false choice between pleasure and politics.

The question of beauty is not a frivolous question. It is, I would argue, the central question of our cultural moment. How we answer it will determine not just what hangs on our walls, but how we inhabit our world.

Welcome to the conversation.