Politics & Power Quote by Brad Holland

Postmodernism’s “contradictions” aren’t, in Brad Holland’s telling, a stylistic quirk so much as a civic hangover: the artist is asked to behave like a good democratic citizen while producing work that, by its nature, resists the social contract. Holland frames the tension with a deceptively simple opposition. Democracy runs on negotiated outcomes, coalition-building, the constant trimming of edges so more people can live with the result. Art, at least the art he’s defending, depends on edges. It needs a point of view sharp enough to cut, a set of choices ruthless enough to exclude.

As an illustrator, Holland is especially attuned to this because illustration lives in the marketplace of consensus. Editorial images are commissioned, revised, vetted; they serve institutions that prefer clarity and broad legibility. Postmodern art, meanwhile, often performs skepticism about institutions, authorship, and stable meaning. The contradiction isn’t just on the canvas; it’s in the workflow. You’re expected to produce something transgressive on schedule, something “challenging” that still won’t offend the client, advertisers, or the imagined average reader.

The subtext is a critique of culture’s demand for democratic representation in art: make it inclusive, make it palatable, make it for everyone. Holland is arguing that this expectation can neuter the very thing we claim to want from artists: not a mirror of compromise, but a refusal of it. The jab is quiet but pointed: when art starts governing itself like a committee, it stops being art and becomes content.