Who’s Making Art for Right-Wingers? On John Heartfield’s Productive Engagement

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Who is making art for right-wingers? The question crossed my mind as I walked through Global Fascisms, a group show of around 50 artists staged in 2025 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. Surely the show’s title and by association its curatorial frame was meant to provoke, but it left me confused instead. While tracing the rise of fascist ideologies through works by artists from around the world, including those I admire, the exhibition failed to acknowledge the local fascisms surrounding the institution itself. I found myself wondering: who is this show for? Is it for people who are already against fascism, and if so, do they really need to be told once again that fascism is bad? Is it to change the minds of fascists today, and would that even be possible? I thought about whether the exhibition might be aimed at the apolitical, or the undecided, but even that felt unlikely.

None of my reflexes felt unique to the experience of this exhibition. These days, the political utility of art appears to have been replaced by counterproductive disengagement, which has become the default mode of communication in the mainstream art world. It is an approach that brings to mind Hillary Clinton’s 2016 description of Donald Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables”¹—the epitome of a disengagement that is not only counterproductive but also takes pride in it. Theoretically, productive engagement remains available as a tool, but there seems to be an increasing lack of will to use it. It is easier to signal righteousness than risk contamination by having opposing ideas and opinions. Writing people off has always been something of a political pastime, but disengagement today feels different: emptier, angrier, less strategic.

Have we, as a species, reached a point of total nihilistic disagreement with “the other”? The right has built its own sealed ecosystem: media networks, cultural communities, and online spaces that are equally hostile to outside perspectives. This is on brand. Right-wing cultural spaces have never claimed openness or dialogue as core values. But the liberal cosmopolitan sphere has, with its inherited discourse of engagement, accessibility, diversity and criticality. When it retreats into self-confirmation, it betrays its own stated commitments in a way that illiberal cultural spaces, which never promised openness, do not. Dwelling within its own fortress, the mainstream art world performs a specific brand of moral clarity to crowds that already agree, while mistaking that fortress for a bridge.

Global Fascisms is not unusual in this regard. It is one instance of a broader institutional mode in which political art has become an aesthetic category rather than a field of struggle. A show titled Global Fascisms could, in principle, do many things: it could diagnose the economic conditions that make authoritarian movements attractive, trace the media architectures that amplify them, or confront viewers with the uncomfortable proximity between liberal complacency and illiberal outcomes. Instead, the curatorial frame positions fascism as something to be against, something already understood, something the audience has already rejected. The exhibition confirms what its intended audience already believes and asks nothing further of them.

This is what counterproductive disengagement looks like at the institutional scale: not the absence of politics, but the performance of political positions so widely shared among the intended audience that they require no persuasion, no risk, no contact with contested ground. The “political” becomes a label that signals alignment rather than initiating struggle. Art that codes itself as progressive and stops there, mistakes the label for impact. Somewhere along the way, the work of persuasion was replaced by the assumption of agreement.

At its best, political art might function as propaganda for doubt: work that unsettles certainties, including the viewer’s own. At its worst, it becomes moral décor that convinces nobody and alienates even those who partially agree. The distance between these two poles is the distance between political art and politically effective art.

This is not to say there are no conservative sympathies within the art world, or that no one has attempted to platform illiberal positions. But there is a difference between artists who hold right-wing views and art that attempts to reach right-wing audiences as a deliberate political strategy. The first is biography, and the second would require the kind of engagement the liberal art world has abandoned. No one, apparently, is making art for right-wingers, and that’s precisely the problem.

If the question is whether art can reach those who disagree, then John Heartfield comes to mind. The 20th century German artist worked in Berlin, the same city where Global Fascisms was staged almost a hundred years later. Heartfield, who created daring political photomontages in response to the rise of fascism between the two World Wars, is not relevant to this conversation because he literally stopped fascism. He didn’t. But his work—sharp, graphic, witty, to the point—certainly tried to reach the undecided, the sympathiser, and the opponent all at once.

What sets Heartfield apart goes beyond the visual quality of his work. It was his diagnosis. His images didn't flatly declare fascism evil—they addressed its underlying causes and proposed alternatives, all in the format of photomontage. Like panoramic paintings of political economy distilled into single images for mass circulation, they diagrammed how fascism worked. His 1932 portrait of Adolf Hitler, aptly titled Adolf, the Superman, Swallows Gold and Spouts Tin, shows the fascist leader with an X-Ray torso revealing gold coins cascading down to his stomach—the financial machinery behind populist rhetoric. His 1930 image Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf: Away with the Stultifying Bandages! depicts a man with a head wrapped in newspapers, blinded by bourgeois media. These weren't just strong images; they spoke to the causation that made fascism possible. They made the greed and fragility of such dictatorial systems visible, one montage at a time.

Did Heartfield's work change a single vote? Slow the Nazi rise by a day? It’s not easy to measure the political impact of art. But his approach to image-making and his refined way of argumentation makes it undeniable. In my view, he gave it a try. Whether or not he reversed history doesn’t determine the quality or strategy of the work. That force exists, regardless. The assumption that art must either be completely political or apolitical is a false binary that obscures what art can incrementally do, and the intangible, infiltrating role it can play in political discourse without transforming everything or nothing at all.

This raises another question: are art institutions, publicly or privately funded alike, even the right space for these conversations? As art professionals, we are all reliant on this economy in some way, but we also know its limits. There are barriers to a white cube gallery space that are not easy to overcome, even with the most accessible exhibition, however you define it. Art still carries an elitist odour to the unprivileged, and no amount of community outreach or free admission fully dissolves that threshold.

The mode of exhibition-making that Global Fascisms represents has plagued the Eurocentric circuits of contemporary art for some time now: a risk-averse curatorial and institutional condition that I have described as Consensus Aesthetics², whereby exhibitions simply serve a status quo even while they appear to be taking a stand. (As is the case with an exhibition in Germany on global fascisms, which failed to confront the resurgence of fascism in the very country where the exhibition was staged.)

Heartfield did not rely on such aversion, nor did he counterproductively disengage. Instead, he adopted a method of productive engagement by trying to build consensus rather than assume it. Deploying what I call strategic empathy, he did not feel sorry for fascists, nor did he alienate them by denouncing them wholesale. Instead, his work demonstrated an understanding of the conditions that made fascism attractive as a precondition for fighting it: economic desperation, media manipulation, and the theatrical seduction of spectacle (sound familiar?). Heartfield engaged with these narratives not by condemning them from a distance, but by entering their logic. As a result, his photomontages were not hung in galleries. They appeared on the covers of left-wing magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, with half a million copies in circulation and sold at newsstands across Berlin as the Nazis rose to power: a form of distribution that the circulation of digital content today seems to echo.

Now, I don't want to idolise anyone, even an artist I admire, but it seems infiltration has become a forgotten art. Sometimes the freshest perspectives come from the past.

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This paper is a response to “Tête-à-Tête: Are All Memes Political?”, a discussion between Al Hassan Elwan and Cem A. moderated by Stephanie Bailey for The Politics of Print: elephant in the room, staged in January 2026 as part of STPI’s annual Print Show & Symposium.