“I’ve always been interested in political art,” says Zwirner, “not in art that tells you how to think and moralizes, but in political art that asks questions. I thought Raymond’s show was extraordinary—great political art is challenging both conceptually and intellectually and is also interesting to look at.” It was also a commercial success, despite what the dealer characterizes as “an art market that is dominated by aesthetics and not content.” He notes that the current collecting climate is somewhat contradictory: “You have a much broader art market than you had 10 years ago, but I’m not sure that the number of very serious collections has grown proportionally. It takes a while to get to deeper levels of discourse in a work of art.”

In fact, he says, it was the more-seasoned collectors who were drawn to Pettibon’s show. Similarly, the key buyers of Chan’s pieces—which start at around $4,500, for drawings, and go up to $60,000, for his animations, produced in editions of five—have been established collectors who, according to Carol Greene, “function at a very high level.” Moreover, they patronize museums. For instance, the New Jersey–based contemporary collector David Teiger bought Chan’s Happiness (finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization—an allegorical 17-minute digital animation referencing the works of the Outsider artist Henry Darger and of the 19th-century social theorist Charles Fourier, among others—and then promised it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Particular galleries have also maintained a commitment to political engagement. Paula Cooper was the first dealer to open in SoHo, and her inaugural exhibition, in October 1968, was a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The gallery’s political consciousness has remained strong over its four decades of operation, whether in offering itself for fundraising events or through its representation of artists who frequently probe social and political issues, such as Sam Durant, Wayne Gonzales and Haacke.

Steve Henry, the gallery’s longtime director, claims that political material today commands “an increasingly open and broader audience.” Haacke, for instance, has been making socially conscious pieces since the mid-1960s and has sold a lot of work in Europe but traditionally has had fewer takers Stateside. Henry says that is changing. “What we have found recently is a very strong interest in the work among institutions and collectors in the U.S.,” he notes, adding that the gallery recently sold Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, perhaps Haacke’s most famous Conceptual piece, to the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. This is quite a turnaround. Part of a series of text-and-image projects that questioned the role of political influence in New York’s low-income-housing market, the piece, tracking the financial transactions of a New York landlord named Harry Shapolsky, was slated for a 1971 solo exhibition of Haacke’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Its slant and subject matter, however, provoked the institution’s director at the time, Thomas Messer, to cancel the entire show, claiming it had “aims that lie beyond art.” After that, says Henry, Shapolsky et al. “was so tainted by the Guggenheim controversy that no [New York museum] wanted to touch it.” Haacke’s art is “still daring” and “has not lost its power to provoke,” says Donna De Salvo, the chief curator and associate director of programs at the Whitney, “but museums and the public are perhaps more able now to grapple with [the critique] that is at the heart of his work.”

Henry, too, attributes some of the new institutional interest in politically charged work to the different tenor of the times. “I think that when you look back 20 years to the culture wars,” he says, “there was no way an American museum could collect a politically challenging work. They just couldn’t, for risk of losing support, both from the private side and from the government. And the legacy of that was still being felt not too long ago—museums were afraid to take that on because they would be subject to such scrutiny and criticism.” He mentions that the gallery also recently sold a work by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad from a series examining military activity in Beirut in the 1970s to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, D.C. Ten or even five years ago, Henry notes, the Smithsonian’s branch for contemporary art would have been unlikely to have acquired a work by an artist “who is critical of Middle East policy on all sides. It’s quite surprising.”