We’ve got an imagination crisis. What does art have to do with it?
29 September 2026
Elena Polivtseva
Europe has been diagnosed with an imagination gap. The recently published European Sentiment Compass 2026, a joint project by the European Council on Foreign Relations and the European Cultural Foundation, finds that most Europeans want Europe to become a better place but struggle to picture what that ‘better place’ might actually look like. This year’s edition carries a telling title, Future Nostalgia: Europe’s unfinished song. Its argument is that while nostalgic politics are gaining ground, the answer is not to aspire to how things used to be, but to restore something societies used to possess: a sense that a better future was possible.
The ‘imagination issue’ did not escape this year’s State of the Union address by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. After an attempt at a candid diagnosis — the state of the Union proclaimed as the ‘strongest’ ever while simultaneously acknowledged as feeling ‘precarious’ — and an exercise in renewed confidence about Europe’s independence, the roughly 75-minute speech concluded with the recognition that something may be missing in how Europe speaks to future generations. The ‘capacity to think Europe’, von der Leyen argued, needs to be rediscovered. Europe must ‘reclaim its imagination’. To do so, she announced a Congress of Europe for 2027, marking the 70th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome, where ‘brightest minds’ would gather to develop a vision for Europe and a story of their own for the next generation.
There is something ironic and maybe symptomatic about reaching back to the Congress of Europe of 1948, explicitly invoked in the speech, as the format through which European imagination is to be reclaimed. But the more important question is why ‘European imagination’ needs reclaiming, and what might actually restore it (surely not the Congress alone).
Whenever a vision of the future is recognised to be missing, the diagnosis is often followed by a prescription: we need a stronger, more positive, emotionally compelling narrative of the future. The cultural sector tends to respond similarly. Whenever politics is said to lack imagination, we point, myself included, towards artists. Who, if not artists, are skilled at inventing other worlds, unsettling what seems inevitable and making alternative futures emotionally tangible?
Interestingly, in this case it is not even clear whether artists will be invited to the Congress. They appeared explicitly in the version of von der Leyen’s speech published online on 16 September (still available here) as potential participants: ‘thinkers and writers, artists and scientists, citizens and civil society’ (translation from French). Yet von der Leyen did not actually say this in her speech, and the line was subsequently removed from the final official version.
Whether artists are invited or not is a crucial question, but let’s allow ourselves to take a step back and reflect on even deeper matters. What actually happens to artistic imagination in today’s world as it stands?
If culture is indeed a space for imagination, and if we live amid an unprecedented abundance of cultural production, why are we being told that societies suffer from an imagination gap? Why are there more cultural events than ever before, with digital platforms flooded with cultural content, and yet we still need to convene a Congress of Europe to fix our imagination? Why do artists’ stories, images and experiments not more visibly become collective visions of the future? Why do artistic utopias so rarely grow into political ones?
What is the actual problem with imagining the future?
The European Sentiment Compass 2026 does not suggest that what Europe lacks is simply a new strong, unifying story. Bold promises about tomorrow will not, by themselves, restore confidence in the future. Nor will small improvements, experienced mainly as another round of crisis management. What is needed, the authors suggest, lies somewhere between ‘dreaming big’ and remaining crisis-defensive. The present needs to be governed in ways that make a better future credible. Delivery matters because people need tangible reasons to believe that tomorrow can actually be different.
Jens Beckert, from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, pushes the diagnosis further. He describes a widespread decline in future-oriented thinking, particularly in countries of the Global North: what is sometimes called a ‘loss of the future’ — uncertainty and pessimism increasingly shape how people understand what lies ahead.
Crucially, Beckert does not argue that societies have simply run out of narratives. The problem is that people are losing the capacity to relate to the future as a collective project. Contemporary conditions have weakened the social and institutional mechanisms through which particular images of the future can become credible, shared and durable, rather than fading away shortly after they emerge.
Precarity is part of the explanation. Economic insecurity shortens the imaginative horizon. When people cannot reliably plan their lives months ahead, projecting themselves into a radically different social future becomes more difficult. Insecurity also pushes people towards spheres of individual control: the future becomes something one manages privately rather than constructs collectively. As life trajectories become framed through personal responsibility, self-realisation, entrepreneurship and consumption, collective aspirations become ‘privatised’.
The issue extends beyond individualism. The social infrastructures through which imaginaries historically acquired collective force have themselves weakened. Political parties, trade unions, religious communities, civic organisations and other forms of associative life once provided durable environments in which abstract visions could be debated, repeated, institutionalised and transformed into shared projects. Their decline leaves imaginaries easily fragmented into temporary mobilisations and isolated communities.
The material foundations of collective futures have weakened as well. Underinvestment in housing, education, healthcare, transport and other public infrastructures does more than weaken services. It removes some of the visible proof that societies are actually capable of constructing a shared future together.
At the same time, as Beckert argues, technocratic and managerial politics narrow the space in which alternative futures can even be contested. When political choices are presented primarily as questions of expertise, optimisation and necessity, politics becomes less about collective will-formation and more about managing constraints. Jonathan White, in In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea, similarly observes that the future increasingly appears not as something politically imagined but as something to be calculated, anticipated and managed.
Finally, as Beckert notes, collective imaginaries require shared communicative spaces: places in which different images of the future can encounter one another, be contested and gradually acquire social meaning. Those spaces, too, have fragmented, as traditional media have lost much of their former dominance. The internet allows multiple bubbles to emerge and an unprecedented number of ideas to circulate at great speed, but too often those ideas remain confined within the bubbles in which they originated.
It may be that the ‘imagination gap’ is not about the scarcity of imagined futures. The gap is created by the reality in which these ideas circulate in segmented environments, mobilising particular groups without necessarily becoming shared reference points for collective action.
Culture: a place of imagining futures?
At the 1948 Congress of Europe in The Hague, culture was at the heart of political reconstruction. Alongside the Political Committee and the Economic and Social Committee, the Congress had a dedicated Cultural Committee, chaired by the Spanish writer and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga, with Denis de Rougemont, Swiss writer, as its rapporteur. Around one hundred delegates took part in its work. The Committee was tasked to draft the Congress’s preamble — ‘to define the spirit that would inform all the work carried out at the Congress’, and debated the cultural foundations of European unity. De Rougemont also helped draft the Message to Europeans through which the Congress articulated its vision of European unity.
Historically, art has repeatedly helped make different futures socially imaginable: the Bauhaus linked aesthetic experimentation to new forms of living; Afrofuturism envisaged alternative futures beyond dominant frames, centring Black identity, agency and freedom; and figures such as Václav Havel, the playwright, dissident and later president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, carried artistic imagination and courage into political life. Italian Futurism offers the darker example: the Futurist Manifesto was created by an artist and later embraced by fascists, a proof that artistic visions of the future can mobilise collective imagination in destructive directions too.
So, what about today? Whether contemporary culture is genuinely imaginative has itself become a subject of debate. Kyle Chayka has described the flattening effects of platform culture and algorithmic recommendation. Jason Farago has asked whether our apparent obsession with innovation has shifted the focus: renewal in the arts increasingly expressed through new topics rather than through fundamentally new artistic languages.
W. David Marx begins Blank Space from a related puzzle: why does cultural invention appear to have decelerated during a historical period of almost limitless cultural production? Writing primarily about American popular culture, Marx identifies several overlapping developments: commercial success displacing other systems of cultural value; risk pushed away by insecurity; platforms turning culture into an intensified competition for attention; and the weakening of subcultural ecosystems through which new styles once developed.
Whether contemporary culture is in fact stagnating is a contested question, provoking debate among cultural critics and scholars. An important implication of Marx’s argument, however, is not that ‘cultural invention’ itself has disappeared. Artists continue to be inventive, but the problem lies in what happens to those inventions afterwards. For novelty to acquire power and enter the public imagination — for an idea to become a discourse — it needs scenes, intermediaries, institutions, critics, audiences and communities through which unfamiliar, even disruptive (and what else can help us picture a different horizon to aspire to?) imaginaries can be recognised, embraced, repeated, contested and eventually become culturally and politically meaningful for many.
The condition of cultural institutions matters enormously in these processes. Across Europe, cultural organisations are operating under overlapping political, economic and social pressures. Scarce resources, social polarisation, and political uncertainty can encourage risk-aversion. Tested formats, established names and demonstrable audiences become easier to defend than expressions and ideas whose value is not yet legible. As Fatoş Üstek observes in The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model: ‘The consequence of institution’s constraining finances, underpaid and overworked staff, authoritarian demeanour, archaic operational frameworks, and financial dependencies all play a crucial role. I believe the majority of art institutions are at the moment standing still in the fear of any movement that might precipitate their demise’.
Even where artists themselves remain visionary, speculative, and future-oriented, cultural institutions may therefore struggle to perform the function of hosting collective imagination: to take up new imaginaries of the future, let them develop, build artistic movements and communities around them, expose them to disagreement and give them enough duration to become something larger than an individual artwork.
There is another structural obstacle here: time. Bojana Kunst has described how contemporary artistic labour has become organised through what she calls projective temporality. In Artist at Work and in Making Temporal Kinships: Beyond the Project, Kunst argues that the project is more than an administrative or funding format, but it is also a way of organising time.
What is a project? It is the present acquiring value through what it promises to produce later. Cultural workers move from project to project, often several simultaneously, while already preparing the applications, partnerships and promises on which the next one depends. This produces a paradox for a sector supposedly concerned with imagining futures: cultural work is intensely future-oriented while increasingly lacking time to establish a meaningful relationship with the future, and to allow it to be open, to begin with.
Kunst contrasts this temporal logic with artistic practices whose value lies in continuity, maintenance, relationships and forms of being together that do not necessarily become more valuable because they produce an identifiable future output. Project logic can marginalise those relational and reproductive dimensions (the ‘art biosphere’) on which artistic ecosystems depend.
Seen through the lens of imagination, projectivisation therefore can prevent imaginaries from acquiring duration and becoming something powerful and collective. The relationships around it may never have enough time to consolidate into a movement, a discourse, a vocabulary, a community. The social infrastructure capable of carrying the ideas forward can remain at the fringe of support if the focus remains largely on short-term trajectories aimed at a final output.
At the same time, the spaces through which culture reaches people have themselves transformed and largely emerged in the virtual world. The internet once promised unprecedented opportunities for collective action, mobilisation around ideas and the collaborative production of knowledge and imagination. Instead, digital cultural environments have become deeply segmented, increasingly organised by algorithmic systems whose mechanisms remain largely invisible to their users. People inhabit isolated cultural and informational worlds. Artistic expressions that are not guaranteed to speak to many, difficult to classify, package or predict may find it especially difficult to travel beyond their initial audiences.
Citing Nina George, the proverbial thing that ‘everyone discusses on Monday morning’ has become harder to imagine. Has one more social infrastructure through which a notion of the future as a shared, collective project weakened?
Cultural policy and the future that is already decided
Cultural policy itself has, over the past few decades, steadily embraced the vocabulary of projects, deliverables and measurable effects. At the same time, the concept of future has entered European cultural-policy discourse increasingly through the language of uncertainty. Ole Marius Hylland, writing about Nordic cultural policy, points to the rising presence of the buzzword ‘preparedness’, and the future appearing in cultural policy discourse increasingly as something unpredictable and uncertain.
The Culture Compass, the EU’s new cultural strategy, is centred on addressing the many crises unfolding simultaneously, and resilience is referenced 17 times across 20 pages, detailing at least seven different types of resilience — territorial, mental, physical, emotional, communal, social, and economic. This marks a contrast with previous European cultural strategies: neither the 2018 New European Agenda for Culture nor the European Agenda for Culture in a Globalising World of 2007 mentioned ‘resilience’ even once.
AgoraEU, the proposed programme for the next EU budgetary cycle 2028—2034, similarly places substantial emphasis on protecting values and democracy. Protecting democratic institutions and European values matters enormously. But the dominant relationship with the future is nevertheless revealing: it is one of safeguarding, protecting, defending, strengthening what we have while preparing for what is to come.
Cultural policy is preoccupied with the future while leaving so little of it genuinely open. Resilience discourse is in many ways future-oriented, but the future arrives primarily as disruption, threat or uncertainty for which one must be ready. What is less visible is an invitation for artists to enter the unknown: to create ideas whose value cannot yet be measured, to support institutions whose role is to host disagreement, or to allow propositions to develop without already knowing what they are meant to achieve.
There are, of course, very real reasons for this resilience lens. Europe and the wider world face profound geopolitical, economic, environmental and social uncertainty. The cultural sector faces an additional destabilising force — artificial intelligence. AI already raises serious questions about artists’ livelihoods and remuneration, while simultaneously unsettling categories central to how artistic work understands itself: authorship, originality, copyright, creativity and creative responsibility. Artists also remain economically precarious. Living from one project to another, combining several jobs and moving between periods of paid and unpaid work creates precisely the kind of insecurity that Beckert identifies as hostile to future-oriented thinking.
This helps explain the growing political interest in basic income for artists. There are good reasons for this interest. Justin O’Connor, Sam Whiting and Tully Barnett point to evidence that greater income security can reduce financial stress, allow artists to turn down unrelated work, decrease the time spent chasing grants and create more sustained time for artistic practice.
But O’Connor, Whiting, and Barnett warn against seeing basic income as the only solution for building strong cultural ecosystems. Income support for individual artists cannot substitute for soft and hard infrastructures around them: arts education, organisations, institutions, studios, equipment, venues and companies, but also mechanisms of exhibition, criticism, circulation, exchange and relationships with audiences. Even solitary artistic practice depends on an ecosystem through which work enters cultural life.
A basic income can give artists greater security and more time to imagine, but it cannot on its own create the conditions in which those imaginaries feed into collectively shared visions and aspirations. This requires a strong arts sector, with structures for professional development and representation, sustainable networks, long-term relationships, spaces for collective experimentation, and platforms of visibility open to a diversity of ideas rather than only to safe bets, as well as honest debate through which ideas can mature and develop into discourse, political imaginaries and potentially shared narratives for the future.
A strong cultural ecosystem can become one of the social infrastructures that Beckert talks about needed not only to produce new narratives (there are many of them produced in different corners of public life), but also to sustain them within society and give them collective force.
Beyond Congresses
None of the symptoms behind the ‘imagination gap’ diagnosed by the Sentiment Compass means that uncertain times cannot generate extraordinary artistic invention. New stories, styles, dystopias, utopias and radically different ways of understanding social life continue to emerge. AI itself, often understood as the biggest source of uncertainty, simultaneously pushes artistic experimentation. And whether culture appears in a State of the Union speech or artists are invited to the future Congress of Europe or not, they will continue to imagine. That is, after all, part of what artistic practice does: it enters spaces that do not yet exist and gives form to possibilities that are not yet socially or politically understandable.
But for imaginaries to be a social resource, societies need infrastructures of collectivity: institutions, networks, spaces and practices through which ideas can be encountered repeatedly, contested, refined, connected to other ideas and gradually turned into shared reference points. Culture needs the same: not only mechanisms for generating imaginaries, but conditions in which they can mature, transform and endure.
So, yes, if Europe is serious about reclaiming its imagination, artists must be in the room. But fora’s imagining Europe will achieve little if the wider conditions through which imagination becomes collective continue to erode. What needs strengthening are the social and cultural structures that allow new ideas to move beyond isolated works, projects and communities, and to become shared, democratic and powerful enough to reshape how societies understand what is possible.
