Name: Waging Art: Artists and the Far-Right in the Global Culture Wars
Start: 2026-01-22T16:00:00-06:00
Location: KU Max Kade Center for German-American Studies

Waging Art: Artists and the Far-Right in the Global Culture Wars

We often think of culture wars as battles over ideas and values. But what if they're really about jobs, funding, and institutional control? This lecture reframes the concept of "culture wars"—a defining feature of contemporary far-right politics—by examining how they operate within cultural institutions themselves. Instead of treating culture wars primarily as ideological clashes, I argue that they are material struggles over resources and institutional power between competing factions of cultural elites during periods of capitalist crisis.
Through the case of Viktor Orbán's Hungarian Academy of Arts, this lecture demonstrates how the current rapid transformation of post-WWII capitalist geopolitics fuels not only trade wars, but also culture wars among artists and intellectuals. It addresses two urgent questions: How do far-right forces mobilize culture to consolidate power? And why do artists—often considered the vanguard of liberal cosmopolitanism—participate in authoritarian projects? By grounding culture wars in their material conditions rather than treating them as purely symbolic contests, this lecture offers a framework for understanding the rising coalition between artists, intellectuals and far-right politics.
Kristóf Nagy is a historical anthropologist and sociologist, based at Princeton University as a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University in 2025/2026. With a background in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art (London) and a Ph.D. in social sciences from Central European University (Vienna), he is specializing in the cultural politics of contemporary far-right governments. His research explores the intersections of imperialism, cultural infrastructures and far-right culture wars through ethnographic and historical methods. At Princeton, he is developing his first monograph on far-right cultural policies and their global historical connections, centering the case of Hungary as a laboratory for contemporary culture wars. For seven years, he has edited Fordulat, a journal of left social theory.
This event is sponsored by the Max Kade Center the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES), the Department of Slavic, German, and Eurasian Studies (SGES), and the Hall Center for the Humanities.