The center moves back by Felix Laursen

For most of the late twentieth century and the opening act of the twenty first, culture booked a one way flight to the United States and refused to check a return ticket. Pop music learned to pronounce its own name with an American accent. Contemporary art discovered that seriousness required a Manhattan zip code. Even European artists, raised on rain, ruins, and subsidized museums, packed their conceptual luggage and reintroduced themselves in Brooklyn, as if geography were a prerequisite for relevance. The center of gravity was not debated; it was rented by the month.

Then came Donald Trump, a political figure who doubled as a performance artist specializing in long form disruption. His presidency did not merely rearrange trade policies or alliances. It unsettled the emotional climate in which culture prefers to live. America, once marketed as a complicated but ultimately generous landlord of global imagination, began to feel like a loud roommate who rearranged the furniture at three in the morning and insisted it was an improvement. For artists, mood matters. Atmosphere is infrastructure. You can build galleries on money but you cannot build trust on tweets.

The shift was not immediate. Culture is slow to abandon a penthouse, even when the elevator smells like smoke. But gradually the tone changed. Visas felt heavier. Jokes curdled faster. Funding conversations acquired a moral aftertaste. European artists who had spent years learning how to be charmingly foreign in America began to rediscover the luxury of being locally strange. Berlin, once dismissed as a rehearsal space for real careers elsewhere, turned back into a destination. Paris stopped apologizing for itself. Athens flirted with relevance again, which is its most ancient habit. The map did not explode; it simply remembered its older shape.

Trump accelerated this remembering by accident. His gift to Europe was not admiration but contrast. Against his carnival of grievance, Europe’s bureaucratic melancholy began to look almost elegant. Slowness became a virtue. Regulation felt like a form of tenderness. The very things American cultural entrepreneurs mocked as obstacles started to resemble shelter. When politics becomes theater, art looks for quieter rooms.

There is also the small matter of fatigue. The United States, for decades, demanded that every cultural product audition for universality while secretly preferring its own reflection. European creators learned to translate themselves into American optimism, into market friendly rebellion, into the grammar of late night interviews and coastal biennials. Trump’s America made this translation awkward. Irony lost its passport. Nuance was detained at the border. It is difficult to perform subtlety in a stadium designed for chants.

So the traffic reversed. Not dramatically, not with farewell parties, but with updated addresses and longer stays back home. Studios reopened in Lisbon. Foundations multiplied in Brussels. Curators started using the word context again without irony. Even the idea of success softened. It no longer meant permanent residence near a venture capitalist, but the ability to work without explaining your politics in a cab ride.

Of course, Europe is not innocent. It exports its own anxieties with admirable efficiency. It hoards history like a nervous landlord hoards keys. It can turn cultural funding into a ritual of paperwork that makes Kafka look undercaffeinated. But it offers something the Trump era made scarce in America: a sense that art is not required to be a national mascot or a protest sign every morning. It can be decorative, difficult, boring, regional, slow. It can fail quietly. This is a form of freedom too.

Pop culture followed, as it always does, pretending it discovered the trend by itself. Fashion weeks regained accents. Music scenes stopped chasing American radio formats and returned to local mispronunciations. Even irony, that fragile European export, came home slightly bruised but alive. The continent remembered how to be influential without asking permission, a skill it once practiced between wars and revolutions.

None of this means America has vanished from the cultural map. Empires do not disappear; they accumulate dust. New York will remain magnetic, Los Angeles will continue to convert sunsets into contracts, and English will keep behaving like a global landlord who never fixes the sink. But the monopoly is over. The idea that seriousness requires an American backdrop now sounds provincial, which is a delicious reversal.

Trump did not intend to decentralize culture. He merely proved how fragile its loyalty can be. By turning the country inward, louder, harsher, and theatrically suspicious of complexity, he reminded the rest of the world that centers are temporary and confidence is a climate, not a constitution. Europe, old and tired and beautifully unfinished, accepted the reminder like a forgotten inheritance. Not with fireworks, but with working hours, modest grants, stubborn languages, and the quiet audacity of believing that art does not need to shout to be heard.