ANYONE with an interest in 20th-century history could be forgiven for sometimes wondering if we’ve found ourselves in a farcical retelling of the last days of the Weimar Republic.

Moral panic, delegitimised institutions, economic and social depression and the rise of gluttonous authoritarians form a collage of a story that has been told before.

Emerging from this chaotic context of the ’20s and ’30s came the Frankfurt School — a group of dissident intellectuals keen to understand cultural and social life through a Marxist perspective. Culture, they thought, gives us a pathway into understanding the reactionary tendency of their age. And culture is not innocent.

Writing about the impact of atrocity on culture, Theodore Adorno noted that after the horrors of the Holocaust, some forms of artistic expression would be rendered inadequate and obsolete. This idea has rung true for me over the past 18 months. If there is no poetry after Auschwitz, how can there be poetry after Gaza?

It’s difficult to put to one side visions of bombs dropping on Gaza settle comfortably to enjoy films or theatre. To be able to meander around the gentle white spaces of a gallery without thinking of wreckage and ruin is to accomplish a horrifying feat of dissociation. For an artist, writer or creative of any sort, I imagine that to not use your talents in service of Palestinian liberation feels like hollow decadence.

The second half of the 20th century produced some truly profound artistic reactions to conflict. Objects in the form of painting and traditional sculpture were outranked by conceptual works which centred the body and social life.

American performance artist Chris Burden’s 1973 work Through the Night Softly responded to the Vietnam war — the first conflict broadcast to Americans in their living rooms in full technicolour. Burden booked an advertising slot on a Los Angeles TV station — interrupting the sedative banality of soap operas and ads for household goods with an unsettling clip of himself wriggling on the ground through broken glass.

In her seminal performance Rhythm 0, Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramovic sat topless and motionless in a gallery in Italy. Beside her on the table lay an array of tools and objects. The audience were invited to do whatever they wanted to her with any of the items. The performance culminated in an ordinarily polite Italian art-loving audience colluding with each other — stabbing a knife next to Abramovic’s crotch, cutting her hair, writing on her body — ending only when one audience member held a loaded gun to her head.

These works were extraordinary in reflecting back to the audience their capacity for committing violence, being complicit in violence and for taking voyeuristic pleasure in watching violence happen to others.

In the face-off between art and commerce, commerce is very much dominating. Globally, we increasingly see all forms of media entangled within the logic of derivatives. Existing cultural objects are repeatedly put through a commercial sausage-grinder and regurgitated as a streaming deluge of remakes, prequels, sequels, franchises — or arbitrarily inserted into other media to boost marketability.

It would be a mistake to assume this tendency is aimed towards satisfying the insatiable appetites of audiences for content. The reality is that risk-averse Wall Street financiers motivated by achieving maximum profit are treating cultural products like any other financial asset.

Every shred of profitability is squeezed from beloved songs, characters, stories and imaginary worlds in the form of remixes, remakes, collaborations and adaptation. The result of this brandification of media is that the creative capacity of global cultural industries are dismantled and wealth is upwardly distributed to increasingly consolidated media corporations. Meanwhile creative labour is devalued and the culture available to us is restricted and decided by an elite class with little interest in art or imagination.

The current genocide in Gaza has created a subgenre of media in itself. On my bus to work, when waiting for a friend, when checking the opening times of a local cafe — I scroll past images and videos of the most violent scenes I’ve ever seen. Children burning alive. Mutilated Palestinians begging for food. So many bombs. Documentary media and social platforms have filled a gap left by other forms of culture to resist or reflect on this conflict as official cultural institutions and mass media have largely left the room, or worse — are actively complicit in concealing the horrors in Gaza and repressing any resistance.

Irish rappers Kneecap were recently booted from their headline slot at TRNSMT — Scotland’s largest outdoor music festival — in response to their members speaking out in defence of Palestinian resistance.

The irony of the festival taking place at Glasgow Green — Scotland’s most historically significant site of protest — is not lost. Several high-profile independent cultural institutions have been under significant fire for refusing to participate in the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

Through the organising of Art Workers for Palestine in Scotland, the censorial repercussions of a cultural ecosystem funded largely by sponsors and funders with links to weapons manufacture have been exposed. Galleries, cinemas and festivals have continually refused to engage their moral backbone and taken as neutral a stance as possible.

Audiences don’t only want art and media that is new, experimental and subversive, and we want cultural institutions to stand for something. This means having red lines, taking risks and having moral integrity when it counts for the sake of freedom of expression, the future of the creative industries and — above all — doing the most good we can for Palestinians with all the tools we have available at every opportunity.