You think the title exaggerates? Consider the evidence. The San Francisco Art Institute is gone. Prestigious academies worldwide are closing. Those that persist are calcifying into irrelevance.Like monarchies: ceremonial, expensive, and increasingly detached from reality. They keep issuing diplomas like royal titles. Impressive to their own circle, meaningless to everyone else.
In Kinshasa, this irrelevance takes perfect form. The Académie des Beaux-Arts still requires students to copy European masters while the street painters it refuses to recognize fill MoMA and the Pompidou. The workshops teach through practice what the Academy buries in theory. The streets didn’t overthrow the institution. They simply built something better alongside it. Merit beating privilege, necessity breeding innovation. The revolution already happened. The Academy just hasn’t noticed.

An exhibition celebrating Congolese art where Congolese people owned basically none of it. A market boom that left local artists poorer than before. Master painters who no longer touch a brush. Galleries where most of the paintings are Pinterest copies. Welcome to Kinshasa’s art world a decade after “Beauté Congo”—where success became the architect of failure, where being discovered by the West meant losing yourself, and where the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. This is what cultural extraction looks like in the 21st century: not with colonial officers and forced labor, but with champagne openings, international acclaim, and prices so inflated that an entire community can no longer afford its own culture.

Walk through Kinshasa today, and you’ll encounter Alfred Liyolo’s legacy in two forms: bronze sculptures gracing public squares and his smiling face on Tembo beer advertisements throughout the city. That a beloved Congolese beer brand chose an artist to represent their product speaks volumes about how Liyolo captured the nation’s heart.
The journey from Bolobo, a humble riverside town on the Congo River where Liyolo was born in 1943, to Kokyo (Tokyo’s Imperial Palace) where he became the first and only African artist ever received by Emperor Akihito, is extraordinary. This is the story of how a grandson of an ivory carver transformed bronze into bridges between worlds, proved that art could speak to emperors and common people alike, and became a symbol of Congolese pride served with every bottle of beer in the nation’s capital.