Catherine Liu, Paul Mellon Distinguished Fellow Lecture 2025

Cultural theorist, author, writer, academic, and professor Catherine Liu gives a lecture at Skowhegan. Liu speaks about the dangers of how difficult it has become for people to find their way to a shared reality in the hyper development of technocratic and liberal ideologies of domination: AI, trauma culture, etc. Liu asks, why is the artist and their process important to an account of what is broken down in the development of the political subject and what we know as our democracies? Liu states that the trauma identity has become something that’s been ideologically produced so that the individual subject has to fit him or herself into a liberal narrative that is bad for art, bad for democracy, and bad for the achievement for individual subjectivity. Liu states how mass human thriving through creative engagement with the shared world is not something capitalism wants to see realized. Art and creativity has become entirely reified as objects and processes. The artist has become caught between bohemianism and entrepreneurial hustle, which allows people to see a peculiar example of thwarted individualism. Liu tells the participants that we are not ready to become political subjects which is why we have to embrace completely clichéd professionally managed identities in our pursuit of both research, knowledge, and art itself. Liu says that one should not be satisfied with the way we have talked about art, nor should we be satisfied with its institutions. Critical theory itself has become a part of the culture industry, mined for profits and circulations by allegedly not-for-profit organizations like university presses and universities. Liu warns that authentic play and aesthetic experience to resist algorithmic domination has become difficult in today’s climate, and the professional class fetish for radicalism and novelty has dominated left-liberal spaces for so long that many people have given up questioning their principles. For Liu, intelligence may serve creativity but it is not creative in and of itself. Liu gives an example about how we think and play which has now become so determined by silicon valley, and how real estate and development is ruled by billionaires. Liu passionately states that we have to break up these monopolies and take back the world, especially because the art world is directed by the will of the donors. For Liu, her left liberal practices is not about taking things away from people and showing our virtue by depriving people of things, and she tells the participants of the importance to build mass movements of trust between people so that we can understand what is actually happening in the shared reality of our world. In order to do this, everyone should be speaking to each other so we become more powerful, because in a post industrial democracy, we all need each other more than ever in the creative process. Liu ends her lecture by telling the participants to be serious about their art work, and not just please people, because the best forms of art reaches the widest spectrum of human emotions.