Primavera: The New Canon

The year continues to fly past and I find myself constantly thrown into flux by the peculiar institution of time. The city is bustling and rife with the new. The New Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem have reopened, the Whitney Biennial returns for its eighty second edition, and the Brooklyn Museum has announced a major new project to renovate and design permanent galleries for its historic African art collection. Everything appears to be happening all at once. Yet at the same time nothing seems to have changed. The cycle of openings, announcements, and institutional renewal continues to reproduce the same condition. Everything is new, but everything is also contemporary. The future often arrives unevenly but I cannot help but wonder what that word- contemporary- still means, and what limits we quietly impose on the past in order to preserve the illusion of the canon.

In my mind’s eye, the canon of contemporary art died in 2007 with the creation of the iPhone. It did not erode slowly. An entire creative epoch collapsed just as technology assumed the imaginative and aesthetic authority that art once claimed. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 solidified this shift, revealing that art could no longer sustain itself as an autonomous medium.

There is one moment that crystallized the death of the canon: Damien Hirst’s auction, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, on September 15, 2008. The sale grossed nearly $200.75 million in twenty four hours. That same morning, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy with more than $600 billion in debt, the largest corporate collapse in United States history and the beginning of the financial crisis. Since then the contemporary has slowly unraveled. Its defining quality was never aesthetic cohesion but rather time itself. If earlier periods of art were bound together by form, ideology, or shared visual languages, the contemporary is the first to be organized almost entirely by chronology. Works are grouped not because they look alike, think alike, or strive toward the same ideals, but simply because they were made now.

Yet even that unity has become unstable. Time itself has grown entangled with wealth, politics, and spectacle to the point of becoming unreliable as a historical ground. The proximity of the spontaneous staging of Beautiful Inside My Head Forever to the collapse of Lehman Brothers is more than coincidence or a final moment of pre recession decadence. It signaled a deeper transformation that many understandably missed in the face of global collapse. In 2008 art became something else in order to survive. The picturesque no longer functioned as a space for reflection or as a stage for grappling with the sublime. Instead it began to obey the logic of finance.

Technology, once imagined as the great equalizer and mass communicator, only accelerated this collapse. Rather than producing a shared visual culture, it dissolved the conditions that once allowed aesthetic movements to cohere at all. What resisted this shift, or what remained faithful to its own aesthetic formulations, was increasingly rendered lesser, an obstacle to the status quo and even more so antithetical to the production of wealth. Art and capital became inseparable, bound so tightly that conditions of value overtook the very conditions of making. History receded as a governing force, and with it craft and intimacy lost urgency.

I have few words to share on the opening of New Humans: Memories of the Future at The New Museum, not because I feel the need to revisit the show but because my mind was simply lost in the space. I expected the vast new walls to bring forth something new, a new way of curating the old and playing with the future, yet the galleries instead acted as a repository of seemingly discarded content. With more than seven hundred objects spread across three floors, I found myself stumbling upon a sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși sitting almost unmarked on a cluttered platform of other sculptural works. Just a few feet away several large scale multimedia installations by Wangechi Mutu competed with a projector flickering overhead, backlighting everything within reach. Formally, I understood that I was in proximity to talent. But in practice there was little humanity near me. Despite the exhibition’s ambition, there was almost no hint that humans were present, only a confusion of leaps, returns, and reversals that left artists and objects without ground. If form no longer binds the contemporary together, then time becomes its only remaining unity. Yet what kind of canon can exist when its sole condition is the present?

To say that the exhibition opts out of a strong thesis is not to say that it lacks a curatorial logic. Rather it suggests an alternative in which the canon itself has become irregular to the curators’ vision. The official statement of New Humans asks what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological change, yet the more urgent question may be whether the contemporary itself has already expired. I am not fond of the idea that technology has become the new art, but I do believe something must replace the contemporary. What is the contemporary beyond the now? It has become an overused category, a dispose of all things moment. To replace something we must first be willing to name what has already passed.

What lies before us is simply what is. There is no breaking of machinery and no refiguring of tools. There is only optimization from here onward, and one hopes it remains human first. What emerges instead is a kind of material noise, a pollution not only of sound but of form itself. Conditions of reception have shifted. The audience now matters more than the work, more than the object, more than the labor that once anchored it all.

This is partly a personal grievance, yet it also points to something structural. There is a step between the contemporary and the futurist that we are not naming, or perhaps actively refusing to see. To acknowledge it would mean admitting that art may not be aligned with the future at all. It may function instead as its antidote, a practice that imagines survival within systems that are indifferent, testing resilience and adaptation in the face of structures designed to fail.

In looking to the past, modernism once referred to a global movement that sought alignment with the experience of modern industrial life. Artists around the world experimented with new imagery, materials, and techniques to create works all different in style but all united by a belief in progress. The contemporary, by contrast, refers to art produced from the 1970s to the present, most often defined by the work of artists who are still alive and less by any shared vision than by the absence of one. It is a category grounded in the perpetual present, a condition that often feels indifferent to the complexity of that very now. And so I return again to the sensation of losing time, or perhaps to the uneasy realization that we know so much that time itself can no longer contain the complexity of the contemporary. It is a paradox at the very least. And when standing in the galleries of the New Museum, I found myself imagining another version of New Humans, one that might have tried to repair something rather than simply cataloguing the many ways we have begun to shrink.

What we have, while grim and overflowing, is in many ways the making of a renaissance, a resurgence of creativity while the world balances precariously. But renaissances demand more than talent or inspiration. They require a reckoning with what has been and what continues to be denied. They require a space where knowing and unknowing coexist so that creation can emerge from necessity. A renaissance can only emerge once the contemporary dies. We inhabit the present, yet the present no longer feels capable of holding us. The canon of contemporary art, as we once understood it, no longer exists.