What is gained and what is lost when contemporary art institutions attempt to define and legitimise Black culture?
In December, among the plethora of annual ‘best of’ cultural lists and reviews of the essential creative works across 2025, Andrew Lawrence, writing in The Guardian, settled on the US blockbuster Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s absorbing Mississippi Delta-based horror film set against the backdrop of the Great Migration, declaring it to be ‘the most culturally important film of 2025’. There is little to refute in that statement; Sinners, among other things, is one of the most affective allegories for the legacies of slavery and white supremacy, and how this provides a genealogy for the continued struggle over the proprietorship of Black American cultures. All this is most evocative in a scene of audiovisual mastery in which Coogler is able to bring blues, jazz, rock, hip-hop and the music of Africa to a point of overlapping and renewed convergence. However, central to Lawrence’s argument was that the film’s cultural importance rests on the fact that Sinners defied the industrial Armageddon that had been predicted by Hollywood insiders based on its $100-million budget and Warner Bros’s unprecedented bestowal of total creative control to its Black director. Sinners, as a popular Black film, represented a triumph over the economic (racial) logics of the US studio system.
Cinema, as a capital-intensive version of mass cultural production, and also a medium through which Black social identities are historically framed, negotiated and fixed, has always been a highly generative site for the recruiting of Black audiences as a source of representation, and resultingly, the cultivation of Black cultural value. But the question that this then begs is what precisely is Black cultural value?
Any answer to this risks the reviving of historic and still unsettled intellectual debates about both what culture is and what Black culture is. The culture industry’s own inflection has historically taken an amorphous, but equally highly perceptible quality. This is a particular paradox, as it is the impreciseness of Black cultural value in the creative industries that opens the space for commodity logics to fashion this as primarily an economic exchange (with some secondary cultural benefits) in a society defined by its absence or lack. Which then becomes the means by which Black audiences can be drawn into its institutional spheres. In simple terms, anything that has the appearance of Black culture can be sold as valuable Black culture. On focusing momentarily on the Black culture formulation’s third dimension, value, the idea is that Black creative works and our experiences of them are instinctively pastoral. Value lies in how works are laden with the promise of enchantment, education and identification, through the racial identity of the practitioner or how the works speak to the histories or contemporary realities of Black people.
Take two examples from last year that spill into 2026. Black Atlas, an exhibition by Edward George, the multidisciplinary artist and founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective, at the Warburg Institute in London, exploring ‘The Image of the Black Archive’ – over 30,000 images documenting people of African heritage – has Black cultural value founded on George’s legacy status as part of the radical Black British moving-image movement of the 1980s. Further, the Tate’s Nigerian Modernism appeals not just to the cultural desires of the Nigerian diaspora in Britain but performs as a concerted Black cultural experience that in turn suggests a subversion of the monoracial programmes of contemporary art institutions. Depending on the specificity of the creative medium, Black cultural value is implied, at other points devised literally as an artwork’s title, or aestheticised within the text to encourage audiences to coalesce over the presence of Black creative outputs. Ideas of Black cultural value, at times paradoxically and at times problematically, attempt to homogenise the subjective positions, ethnic identities and dispersed geographies that make up the global Black lifeworld. For the culture industry, Black cultural value is now posited as event culture.
But what occurs when Black cultural value moves beyond popular culture? When it becomes attached to the arcane field of British contemporary art? When its value becomes circulated beyond the popular mediums that have been defined as vulgar, diurnal and accessible, and within a cultural field that is by its very nature conceptually abstruse, and tends to foreground not encompassment but esoterica as its criterion of value? These are considerations that have of course populated the writings of the Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall. The consideration here was that Black popular culture was inherently a question of Black cultural politics, of contestation, and that the association of the ‘popular’ with hyper-celebration, counterposed to the moderate nature of high culture, leads the latter to regard the former with suspicion. Notions of Black cultural value now bridge both aesthetic poles, but carry with them further complications to this politics.
The production of Black cultural value as both a journalistic endeavour and a fervour, which unequivocally supports its presence in contemporary art, is generally achieved through accumulation and association. In practice, diverse and often disparate artworks and practitioners become unified by theme, identity and presence: are ascribed the term ‘Black’ as a taxonomical preface (which may serve an uncomplicated capitalistic imperative as much as functioning as a racial and cultural descriptor); and suggest that our engagement with such works will be exchanged for the experience of cultural value (which is much more interventionalist in its intentions). My critique is one that enjoys a slender homology to the predilections of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the two most recognisable proponents of The Frankfurt School’s version of cultural theory. For, remaining with the gallery context, Black cultural value’s venture into the nomenclatures of contemporary art, which subsequently renders it as popular (in its curating, marketing and celebration rather than in its actual ability to transcend social or spatial borders), has proved to be particularly successful in regard to cultural production but emerges as less attentive to the idea of consumption.
This is an important addendum to any formulation of Black cultural value, for the actual structures of cultural value developed by Black audiences through an engagement with British art often relegate art itself as cultural value’s essential component. In the migration of mass-popular cultural forms and their constituents to the public programmes of contemporary art institutions, Black audiences may find significant cultural value through only a passing engagement with artworks from and of Black history, homelands and peoples when aggrandised within the gallery space, and where, in a cultural process most alive at racial junctures, a shared presence reconstitutes the gallery as a site of Black communal restoration and remedy.
As is often the outcome when engaging with the nebulous field of Black cultural politics, we arrive at an interesting paradox. Given the derivation of Black cultural value from Black culture, such value is not holistically (or at times even equally) invested in recruiting Blackness to enter contemporary art’s alignments of experience. Black cultural value is as much about the utility of culture to configure contemporary art institutions as a space of seamless cross-racial cohabitation, as it is about the density of Black aesthetics and the correspondence between artefact and audience. Both are essential. But without being indexed to the sensibilities of an unrarefied Black audience, the industrial importation of Black cultural value may only succeed in carving out a new discursive artistic and aesthetic space that works to the exclusive benefit of the cultural industry. Cultural value, Black or otherwise, is an inherently relational experience. And in accepting the idea of Black culture as unificatory, it is a value that can horizontalise the popular with the arcane when accrued through the innate binds of sameness against the contours of nationhood and (un)belonging, and not primarily through the parlances of art and aesthetics. Undoubtedly, throughout 2026 the culture industry will offer up a body of essential creative works as of Black cultural value. But it requires a different kind of key and imagination, the recognition that this is not merely an outcome of production, but of the tacit conjures of Black collectivism.
Read next Edward George’s audio-visual musing on the representation of Black figures in Western art
