‘New Humans’ and the Strange End of Contemporary Art as We Know It
In a first reaction to the New Museum’s opening exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” Artnet News argues that the project of “contemporary art” may be reaching an endpoint. The show inaugurates the newly expanded New Museum building in New York, featuring an addition designed by OMA, and includes works such as Judith Hopf’s concrete figure “Phone Use 5” (2021–22) and Simon Denny’s sculpture based on an Amazon “worker cage” patent (work dated 2019; patent cited as US 9,280,157 B2, 2016). Although billed as a confrontation with technological change, the article says the exhibition treats current tech anxieties only lightly and instead frames “visions of the future” so broadly that it encompasses architecture, animal transformation, and a strong undercurrent of 20th-century Modernism. The piece characterizes the exhibition as uneven but full of notable moments, and suggests its fixation on earlier avant-gardes makes the “new humans” feel like “old humans.”
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This story was covered in Museums on the Brink, Heritage Under Fire