One year later art historian Susanne von Falkenhausen commented on the controversial nature of the 9th Biennale: "Finding myself confronted with such a unified front of fantasies, rhetorics, pretensions and desires for authenticity in 2017, I confess that I revised my reaction to DIS’s 2016 Berlin Biennale 9, 'The Present in Drag'. That exhibition rigorously, to the point of cynicism, followed the web 2.0 world of digital prosumer reality and the moral ambiguity of its promises and aesthetics. In my view, it catered to a young, white, middle-class audience, but now it strikes me as more realistic than what we are seeing today: an outsourcing to the (post-)colonial other of the political, guilt, spiritual desire and collectivity that plague the Western-Northern self."
