Is assuming responsibility for audiences’ emotions a legitimate role of the museum, artist, and curator? Does this responsibility change—increase or lessen—when the museum is within a university setting? Edelman explores these questions, as well as others about the relationship between academic discourse and artistic interpretation, through a discussion of Mlangeni's 2023 exhibit.

Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that celebrate the heroic artist who embodies political resistance against the authoritarian state. These narratives, as Yapp establishes, prevent Chinese art, aesthetics, and politics from being discussed in the West outside the terms of Western liberalism and notions of the “universal.”