Does the cultural establishment recognise a cultural event when they see one?

or would they rather censor the Harbour Bridge march?

Banner by Margaret Mehjhu

It might sound like a silly question, but I'm serious: why have there been no art reviews of the Sydney Harbour Bridge march as a cultural event?

Just as the Vietnam War unleashed a crisis of institutional legitimacy that threw even the art world into chaos (and eventually produced institutional critique as a minor by-product), so too does the failure of the political class to deal with Zionism and Palestinian genocide undermine the legitimacy of all social institutions, especially those like the art world that carry an ideological burden. Hence my question.

It's 2025, and social practice has become the dominant mode among progressive artists, yet the discipline of art criticism still restricts itself to the activities in art institutions and galleries—to the art world—rather than events in the real world that can be interpreted as culturally significant. This institutional myopia represents one of the most profound failures of contemporary cultural discourse. While tens of thousands of people shut down the Sydney Harbour Bridge in solidarity with Palestinian resistance, art critics remain fixated on gallery openings and biennale politics, missing entirely the most significant cultural activism of our time.

The Harbour Bridge demonstration of August 2025 represents everything that institutional art criticism fails to understand about contemporary cultural practice. When police ordered the march to stop, citing "safety concerns," they were responding to an event that had been dismissed in advance as just a cultural performance of “virtue signalling”, but that suddenly was recognised as a genuine challenge to state authority. Yet where were the art critics? Where was the cultural analysis of this extraordinary moment when one of Australia's most iconic structures became the site of anti-colonial resistance?

This is not merely a question of expanding art criticism's purview—it's about recognising that the most significant cultural activism of our time operates entirely outside the institutional frameworks that art criticism continues to privilege. The Harbour Bridge protest was not art in any institutional sense, but it was undoubtedly one of the most powerful cultural interventions in recent Australian history. The fact that art criticism lacks the conceptual tools to engage with such events reveals its fundamental irrelevance to contemporary cultural struggle.

The Harbour Bridge as Cultural Site

When tens of thousands of people occupied Sydney Harbour Bridge in solidarity with Palestinian resistance, they transformed one of Australia's most potent symbols from an icon of colonial achievement into a site of anti-colonial resistance. This transformation was not representational—it was not about creating a symbol of solidarity but about enacting solidarity itself. The cultural significance of this action lay not in any aesthetic object it produced but in its demonstration of collective power and its modelling of alternative forms of public engagement.

The bridge, completed in 1932 during the height of the British Empire, has always functioned as more than mere infrastructure. It represents the colonial project's mastery over landscape and its capacity to impose European engineering solutions on Indigenous country, transforming Sydney Harbour from Aboriginal fishing grounds into a global shipping hub. When Palestinian solidarity activists occupied this space, they were not simply using a convenient location for protest; they were directly challenging the colonial logic that the bridge embodies.

This is what I mean by cultural activism that operates as verb rather than noun. The Harbour Bridge protest was not about producing cultural objects for institutional consumption but about interrupting the normal functioning of colonial infrastructure. When activists shut down one of Sydney's primary transport arteries, they demonstrated that the systems we take for granted—bridges, roads, and shipping routes—are not neutral infrastructure but active components of ongoing colonial violence.

The police response revealed the state's recognition of this challenge. When authorities cited "safety concerns" to justify shutting down a peaceful demonstration, they were not responding to actual physical danger but to the political danger posed by successful collective action. The sight of tens of thousands of people acting in coordinated solidarity with Palestinian resistance represented a direct challenge to the colonial logic that depends on the atomisation and disempowerment of potential resistance movements.

The Mechanisms of Cultural Suppression

The absence of serious cultural analysis of the Harbour Bridge protest reflects broader patterns of suppression that extend far beyond traditional censorship. While Meta systematically removes Palestinian content from its platforms and universities silence pro-Palestinian student groups under the guise of combating anti-Semitism, art criticism maintains its focus on institutional programming that poses no threat to existing power structures.

This is not accidental. The institutional art world operates as a sophisticated mechanism for channelling dissent into harmless spectacle. It functions on two equally repressive levels: for those outside the art world, it serves to mystify and alienate genuine cultural resistance; for those within it, it provides the illusion of political engagement while ensuring that nothing actually changes. Art criticism, as currently practised, serves as the theoretical apparatus that legitimises this containment.

When universities and cultural organisations deploy the highly contentious IHRA definition of anti-Semitism to silence Palestinian advocacy, when they practice what can only be described as platform necropolitics, they demonstrate the art world's fundamental allegiance to the neoliberal business model that sustains it. The institutional definition of art has never really been "it's art because we say so"—it has always been "it's art because we can exhibit it and profit from it."

Art criticism's failure to engage with events like the Harbour Bridge protest represents a more subtle but equally effective form of suppression. By restricting its attention to institutional programming, art criticism ensures that the most significant cultural activism of our time remains invisible to cultural discourse. This invisibility is not neutral—it actively serves to delegitimise forms of cultural practice that challenge institutional authority.

Collaborative Practice and Community Embedding

The Harbour Bridge demonstration exemplifies the collaborative imperative that has become central to effective cultural activism. This was not the work of individual artists seeking institutional validation but the product of extensive community organising that brought together diverse solidarity groups, trade unions, and community organisations. The cultural significance of this collaboration extends far beyond the immediate political impact of the demonstration itself.

When activists coordinate to shut down major infrastructure in solidarity with Palestinian resistance, they are not just protesting Israeli violence but demonstrating the possibility of collective action that transcends national boundaries and state control. This prefigurative dimension—the modelling of alternative forms of social organisation—represents one of the most important functions of contemporary cultural activism.

The most significant development in cultural activism over the past decade has been the increasing dominance of collaborative and collective practices, not because collaboration is inherently more radical, but because it models the organisational forms necessary for addressing the tremendous challenges we face. The neoliberal art business can easily accommodate individual collaborations, as it has done for centuries, but it cannot contain community-embedded practices that refuse to separate cultural production from political organising.

This is what I learned during my years working with trade unions in the 1980s, when we established Union Media Services as one of the first specialist social marketing organisations in the world. Our real work was not the publications and campaigns we produced for unions and community groups; it was our successful agenda to reform trade union communications entirely. We understood that the art was in the communication systems we developed, not in the print materials that resulted from them.

Similarly, the most significant cultural activism around Palestinian solidarity is happening in the development of new forms of organisation and communication that can sustain resistance over time. The Harbour Bridge demonstrations represent the visible manifestation of months or years of community organising, network building, and capacity development that remains invisible to institutional art criticism.

The Failure of Representational Approaches

Art criticism's institutional focus reflects its continued investment in representational approaches to cultural activism—the idea that cultural work functions primarily by creating representations of political struggles for consumption by external audiences. But the Harbour Bridge protest operated according to a different logic entirely, one that refuses the separation between representation and reality, cultural work and political organising, aesthetic practice and material resistance.

The most effective cultural activism around Palestinian solidarity does not represent colonial violence; it interrupts it. When activists shut down the Harbour Bridge, they were not creating a representation of Israeli occupation but actively disrupting the normal functioning of a colonial settler state that supports that occupation. When social media activists circumvent algorithmic censorship to share testimonies from Gaza, they are not producing cultural objects about Palestinian suffering but creating direct channels of communication that bypass institutional gatekeepers.

This distinction is crucial because it reveals the limitations of the representational approaches that continue to dominate institutional art practice. The institutional art world excels at producing representations of oppression—exhibitions about historical injustices, performances that simulate resistance, installations that aestheticise suffering. But these representational practices often function to contain and neutralise the very struggles they claim to support.

When Palestinian experiences are transformed into art objects for institutional consumption, when Palestinian resistance is aestheticised for gallery audiences and Palestinian suffering becomes the raw material for cultural production, the result is not solidarity but a sophisticated form of colonial extraction. Real cultural resistance operates differently—it refuses the separation between cultural production and political organising, aesthetic practice and material struggle, representation and direct action.

The Question of Effectiveness

If we measure effectiveness in terms of institutional recognition, media attention, or cultural legitimacy, then the Harbour Bridge demonstration might appear to have limited impact. Mainstream media coverage focused primarily on traffic disruption and police response rather than the political content of the demonstration. Cultural institutions remained silent and art critics ignored the event entirely, no doubt they would see it as not their concern.

But if we measure effectiveness in terms of community building, network development, and the cultivation of sustained resistance capacity, the mechanics of cultural change, then the picture looks very different. The Harbour Bridge demonstrations succeeded in demonstrating the possibility of large-scale collective action in solidarity with Palestinian resistance. They provided thousands of participants with direct experience of successful organising, strengthened networks between different solidarity groups, and contributed to the development of tactical knowledge that can be applied to future actions.

This is why the right wing has a much better understanding of cultural change than most of the left—they correctly recognise that culture is upstream of politics, but they also understand that the institutional art world is a captive system that poses no real threat to existing power structures. The most significant cultural activism happens outside institutional frameworks entirely, often using media that the art world does not regard as legitimate and forms that are indistinguishable from normal daily life.

The real artists in the Palestinian solidarity struggle are the organisers who mobilised those tens of thousands of people to shut down Harbour Bridge, the social media activists who circumvent algorithmic censorship to share testimonies from Gaza, and the community groups that organise boycotts and divestment campaigns. These practitioners understand something that institutional art criticism has forgotten: that effective cultural activism must be embedded within communities that are both participants and audiences, not imposed from above by self-appointed cultural authorities. Institutional art criticism has chosen to limit itself to discussing the collectible detritus of these cultural events rather than the events themselves.

Beyond Institutional Frameworks

The Harbour Bridge protest points toward possibilities for cultural criticism that extend beyond institutional frameworks. Instead of restricting our attention to gallery programming and biennale politics, we might develop critical approaches that can engage with the full spectrum of contemporary cultural practice. This would require fundamental changes in how we understand the relationship between cultural work and political struggle, aesthetic practice and social organisation, criticism and activism.

Such an approach would recognise that the most significant cultural activism of our time operates at the margins of or entirely outside institutional frameworks. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, for example, has achieved significant material impact not through institutional cultural programming but through grassroots organising that targets the economic and political structures sustaining Israeli occupation.

Similarly, the most effective cultural resistance to censorship has come not from appeals to institutional protections but from the development of alternative platforms and distribution networks that can operate independently of corporate and state control. These alternative systems may reach smaller audiences than mainstream platforms, but they reach audiences that are more likely to translate cultural engagement into political action.

This embedded approach to cultural activism has deep roots in Palestinian resistance traditions. Palestinian cultural workers have long understood that their primary task is not to represent Palestinian suffering for external audiences but to sustain Palestinian resistance through the development of cultural practices that maintain community cohesion, preserve historical memory, and transmit strategies of survival and resistance across generations.

The Necessity of Choosing Sides

There is no neutral position from which to analyse Palestinian solidarity movements—you are either supporting Palestinian liberation or you are complicit in Palestinian oppression and genocide. The pretence of analytical neutrality is itself a political position, one that serves to legitimise the status quo by treating colonial violence as a subject for academic debate rather than a reality that demands immediate action.

The Harbour Bridge demonstration represents a clear choice of sides. When tens of thousands of people shut down one of Sydney's most iconic structures in solidarity with Palestinian resistance, they were not engaging in neutral cultural analysis but taking a clear political position. When police cited safety concerns to order them to stop, the state was also taking a clear political position. When cultural institutions and art critics ignore these events while claiming to support diversity and inclusion, they too are taking a clear political position.

The question is not whether cultural criticism can maintain analytical distance from political struggle, but whether it can contribute meaningfully to the development of effective resistance. Art criticism's current institutional focus—with its emphasis on representation over action, symbolic gesture over material support, and cultural consumption over political engagement—represents a choice to prioritise institutional legitimacy over human empathy.

The alternative approach that I have outlined here prioritises community embedding over institutional validation, collective action over individual expression, and material impact over symbolic gesture. This represents a different choice, one that aligns cultural practice with the actual needs of resistance movements.

Toward Embedded Cultural Criticism

The Harbour Bridge protest reveals the poverty of contemporary art criticism's institutional focus. While tens of thousands of people engaged in one of the most significant cultural interventions in recent Australian history, flipping the meaning of a nationally significant structure from colonial triumphalism to a globally significant image of anti-colonial resistance, art critics remained fixated on gallery programming that poses no challenge to existing power structures. This represents not just a missed opportunity but a fundamental failure to understand how cultural change actually operates.

If cultural criticism is to have any relevance to contemporary struggles for liberation, it must develop approaches that can engage with the full spectrum of cultural practice, not just the narrow range of activities that occur within institutional frameworks. This requires recognising that the most significant cultural activism of our time operates outside the art world entirely, embedded within communities that are fighting for their survival and liberation.

The censorship and suppression that Palestinian solidarity activists face is not a problem to be analysed but a reality to be confronted. The colonial violence that Palestinians experience daily is not a subject for critical study but an injustice that demands immediate action. The cultural resistance that Palestinians and their supporters have developed is not an object of theoretical inquiry but a source of practical wisdom about how to build effective movements for liberation.

The Harbour Bridge demonstration points toward this possibility—not as a cultural representation of solidarity but as solidarity itself, not as a symbolic gesture but as a material intervention, not as an object for critical analysis but as a model for future action. The question is not whether we can analyse these movements from a position of neutral distance but whether we can learn from them and contribute to their continued development.

Art criticism must choose: it can continue to restrict itself to institutional programming while the most significant cultural activism of our time remains invisible to cultural discourse, or it can develop approaches that recognise the Harbour Bridge protest and similar actions as the most important cultural criticism of our time—criticism enacted through collective action rather than written analysis, that supercedes the feeble squeeks of conventional criticism because it interrupts rather than represents and builds rather than merely observes.

I know which choice I have made. The question is which choice art criticism will make.