Art for Our Age of Chaos

“Whitney Biennial 2026” is an enormous show, with works by more than fifty artists filling much of the Whitney Museum of American Art. “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the opening exhibition at the New Museum’s greatly expanded quarters on the Bowery, is even bigger, with works by more than a hundred artists filling the entire building. The scale of these exhibitions can feel aggressive, even defiant in a period when nearly all cultural institutions are confronting an increasingly distracted public as well as financial challenges that began long before the current administration came to power in Washington. Although the Biennial aims to take the temperature of contemporary art and “New Humans” is a historical show that explores the moral and philosophical impact of the technological advances of the past hundred years, the layouts of the exhibitions are surprisingly similar. In both of them, works that fill entire rooms are juxtaposed, sometimes uneasily, with offerings that are almost miniature, as if the curators had decided there were only two ways for a work of art to persuade the public: either by shouting or by whispering. At the Whitney an example of going big is Until we became fire and fire us, an immersive multimedia exploration of contemporary Palestinian experience by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, while Jasmin Sian, with her four- or five-inch-high mixed-media paper cutouts, may want us to have an experience that approaches the mystical or even sacerdotal as we focus on the tiniest elements.

I can only speculate as to what museumgoers are going to make of these major undertakings by two institutions that dominate the downtown Manhattan art scene, the New Museum on the Lower East Side and the Whitney all the way to the west, overlooking the Hudson River. Exhibitions this diverse pose a challenge even for critics, who over the years have tended to deal with the dozens of iterations of the Biennial by picking out a handful of artists or works that they particularly like and saying little or nothing about the rest. I could play favorites among the offerings at the Whitney, but there’s nothing in the show that spoke to me with any urgency. If museumgoers find themselves bewildered, as I did, it’s worth considering that at least some of their bewilderment is shared by the people most immediately involved with these exhibitions. In a catalog essay Drew Sawyer, who organized the Biennial with another Whitney curator, Marcela Guerrero, observes that

the usual infrastructures of the art ecosystem—galleries, fairs, biennials, museums, publications, MFA programs—still stand, but increasingly as sites of ambivalence, complaint, and fatigue.

This brings us back to the spirit of defiance. The curators want to respond to the sad state of the world, full of “darkness and strife,” according to the Whitney’s catalog, and “recurring collective trauma,” according to the New Museum’s, but also to the strife and trauma in the contemporary art world, where attention has been monopolized by a small group of blue-chip galleries that operate around the globe even as the affordability crisis has left creative people, never strangers to economic challenges, imperiled.

If you’re going to choose to go to only one of these shows, I would opt for “New Humans.” The New Museum expansion, designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, is worth a look, mostly for a dramatically zigzagging staircase that has an appealing Baroque-meets-high-tech energy. And although Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s artistic director, who put together the show with four other curators, can’t resist giving this account of the trials and tribulations of modernity a somewhat overblown theatricality, at least he has a story to tell, which I can’t say for the Whitney Biennial. “New Humans” is about the challenges presented by technological advances, which can make life both easier and harder and inspire a giddy optimism that all too often sours, with utopian dreams a prelude to dystopian nightmares. We didn’t need Gioni to point out that these concerns, reflected in the work of many of the early-twentieth-century artists included in the show, are widespread today. The rapid development of AI, which now dominates so much public discussion, will surely be as transformative as the development of the steam engine or electrical power in earlier times. Gioni sees “a symmetry between the first few decades of the twentieth century and the first quarter of this one.” He may not be wrong.

“New Humans,” which includes among its fourteen sections explorations of mechanical reproduction, robotics, and cities of the future, is about technological innovations not so much as fact but as fantasy, the new becoming a mirror in which everybody sees what they want to see, whether hopes or fears, possibilities or problems. In “Hall of Robots” the fundamentals of the human body are subjected to a series of transformations, from Franz Tschakert’s transparent model of a man conceived in the 1930s, with every bone, nerve, artery, vein, and organ clearly visible, to H.C. Westermann’s The Silver Queen (1960), a handyman’s joke cobbled together from plywood, iron, and a galvanized metal weather vent, and Nam June Paik’s Bakelite Robot (2002), an assemblage of vintage Bakelite plastic radios and LCD television monitors that blinks but probably doesn’t think. In the section “Future Cities,” pages from a book of architectural fantasies by the Russian Constructivist Iakov Chernikhov published in 1933 hang near the Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez’s sprawling, riotously colorful Ville fantôme (1996), a toy city lovingly constructed from paper, cardboard, and plastic. There’s also a selection of rather saturnine architectural models, intricate exercises in the juxtaposition of elements including copper, aluminum, and Plexiglas, made in the 1960s by the Dutch artist Constant. If you visit “Future Cities” at certain hours you may even find, floating above these imaginary locales, Anicka Yi’s In Love with the World (2021–2025), jumbo helium balloons in shapes that suggest jellyfish. These benignly dreamy drones appear to be surveying the gallery, even as we find ourselves surveying them.

If there is a thesis in “New Humans,” it’s that what it means to be human is extraordinarily unstable. Whatever religion or philosophy might regard as essential is endlessly mutable, the person perpetually shaped and reshaped by the environment. Humanity, Gioni writes, “is increasingly complex, permeable, intricate, hybridized, adaptable.” The artists in “New Humans” are presented not as creators of discrete objects but as commentators, critics, and actors bending humanity this way and that, at least when it isn’t the machine that’s bending them. Change becomes the only constant, and because change is conceived here as almost inevitably precipitated or at least informed by technological change, it becomes unclear to what extent our consciousness is ours—or the machines’. While these are questions worth asking—AI makes them unavoidable—the artists and writers involved with “New Humans” seem so beguiled and even tickled by their own ingenuity that the show and the accompanying catalog end up feeling weirdly carnivalesque. “New Humans” is a fun house for theorists. In the catalog, McKenzie Wark, the author of A Hacker Manifesto (2004), announces that “whatever the human is, what marks its boundaries, becomes a whole series of other others—technical, natural, supernatural.” Wark’s stylish splattering of words parallels the jazzy juxtapositions in the galleries: it’s so deep that it’s shallow.

The themes of “New Humans”—moral, ethical, philosophical, sociological, scientific—would fit as easily in a museum of the history of science and technology as in an art museum. Maybe more easily. The exhibition includes photographs taken for documentary purposes along with other items that one wouldn’t necessarily define as works of art, such as Rudolf Laban’s diagrammatic notations relating to the operation of certain machines. Some sections of the show are thematically and historically expansive—“Hall of Robots,” for example—while others tend to focus on a particular time or place. A section titled “New Images of Man” commemorates an exhibition of that name, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, that explored the human figure as represented after the Holocaust and Hiroshima in the work of artists including Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, and Francis Bacon. “New Humans” finds a place for every kind of visual statement, from cool and crisp to hot and wild. Here style is amorphous, pluralistic, not substance but evidence; the work of art is a document in support of an argument, an exhibit in the court of public opinion.

Andrew Breitbart’s much-celebrated observation that “politics is downstream from culture” must be reframed to understand the situation in museums today, where politics and culture are tumbled together in a whirlpool or rapids. This is true not only of “New Humans” but also of the Whitney Biennial, where whatever is on display is almost invariably presented with reference to a personal story or a history that has larger sociopolitical implications. Guerrero’s catalog essay, “Creatures Akin,” could as easily be in the “New Humans” catalog. She writes about a “gestational relationality” that “implies a bearing down on interdependent relationships that can happen among and beyond humans.” This in turn means that “natural materials” can “semi-shape themselves when aided by a caring human hand.” At the Biennial the idea that the artist’s materials might have a life of their own, although it echoes Michelangelo’s dream of releasing a sculpture already contained in a block of marble, becomes part of a more general assumption that the artist can’t ever act entirely alone but must instead interact with the environmental, social, and political forces that shape our world.

According to Sawyer, the artists he and Guerrero have selected for the Biennial “engage with or explore various forms of being in relation—from geopolitical to societal to familial to interspecies.” Museumgoers may find themselves spending less time with the work on display than with the accompanying captions, which include links to conversations with the artists on the Bloomberg Connects app. Sarah Rodriguez’s aluminum sculptures, openwork assemblages composed of elements cast from found objects, are visually arbitrary, but that won’t stop some from seeing a deeper logic when they discover in the wall text that Rodriguez “also works as an animal trainer, and her abstract compositional choices are partly inspired by patterns of non-human behavior.” As for Teresa Baker’s hanging compositions, abstract banners composed in tasteful color combinations, I doubt they would have found their way into the Biennial if Baker weren’t so eager to talk about “the cultural resonance of her materials,” the primary one being AstroTurf. In a conversation in the catalog she describes how she discovered AstroTurf while “just wandering through Home Depot” in a very small town in southeast Texas. She goes on to explain that she likes that it’s “a low-brow material” and “that it’s not precious; it’s approachable.” This is the anthropological justification for Baker’s undistinguished abstractions.

The curators at the Whitney don’t mind that the works on display do not “cohere into a singular aesthetic or approach.” Why should they? What counts isn’t what the work looks like—that’s just party dress—but what it’s about. The moral is all that matters. Sawyer is particularly interested in a number of artists who make use of stuffed animals, including Precious Okoyomon and the collective CFGNY (which we are told can stand for “Cute Fucking Gay New York,” among other things). Sawyer relates the use of stuffed animals to “the turn to cuteness—the diminutive and ostensibly unthreatening aesthetic tendency that circulates easily through global commodity cultures.” This, he believes, can be mobilized “as a tactic for navigating the contradictions of intimacy, threat, and appeal.” At the Biennial the creative impulse is more often than not a social or political impulse and the work itself is a document, a way of giving your values some concrete form.

If “New Humans” and the 2026 Whitney Biennial look chaotic, it’s because the curators believe we’re living in a period of cultural chaos; that’s the message they’re delivering to a large, heterogeneous, nonspecialist public. These extravaganzas are engineered to feel absolutely contemporary—the urgency pulls people in—but they’re also products of a very old tradition, distant relatives of the enormous public exhibitions that throughout the nineteenth century made it possible for a growing European middle class to discover whatever was new in the arts. Figuring out what’s really new has never been easy. Making the new newsworthy—especially in a diverse democratic society—has always been a challenge. In 1846 Charles Baudelaire, a quick study when it came to the cultural currents of his time, found that all kinds of museums and galleries had “thrown wide their doors to the multitude.” In the international expositions that became so important in the second half of the century, developments in the visual arts were displayed along with developments in science and technology.

Art criticism as we know it evolved in response to the appetite for contemporary art, a phenomenon reflected not only in Baudelaire’s accounts of the confrontation between the new art and the new public but also in remarkable writings by Gautier, Heine, Kleist, Schlegel, Stendhal, Thackeray, and Zola, as well as others, Théophile Thoré among them, who because they specialized in the visual arts are not really read today. Nevertheless, Baudelaire’s works stand alone. Nobody else saw so early and so clearly the dual and most likely irreconcilable forces that were at play. The audience for new art, through no fault of its own, was rarely prepared to make the complicated judgments that these immense exhibitions demanded; people simply didn’t have the training. They might have been prepared to appreciate more traditional works, but they lacked the deep familiarity with the arts without which it was impossible to respond to artists who were pushing in new, unexpected directions. “For us,” Baudelaire wrote about the Salon of 1859, “the natural painter, like the natural poet, is almost a monster.” How could Baudelaire’s us—the public that hungered for these shows and maybe even hungered for the new—possibly understand what the most challenging artists were up to? “The people are not artists,” he concluded, “not naturally artists; philosophers perhaps, moralists, engineers, connoisseurs of instructive anecdotes, whatever you like, but never spontaneously artists.”

Baudelaire grasped a central paradox of modern life: the same democratic forces that produced a public eager to engage with the arts freed artists, at least certain artists, to pursue lines of thought and feeling that were unlikely to find much broad public support. Misunderstandings, which were inevitable, produced what we have come to recognize as the most explosive confrontations between the new public and the new art: the outraged response to Matisse’s Femme au chapeau at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1905 or the scandalous notoriety achieved by Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. But however fascinating they are as social history, these events tell us nothing significant about the work of Matisse or Duchamp.

A tendency to mistake landmarks in the history of taste for landmarks in the history of art remains a problem today, when certain exhibitions become widely discussed and later remembered not for what’s on display but for the controversies the work inspires. An example is the 2017 Whitney Biennial, in which Open Casket, Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in his coffin, became a flash point among those who believed that a white artist had no right to take as her subject the sufferings of a Black man. Contemporary survey shows need a hook, if not a debate that arises spontaneously then at least a theme that seems to unite what are inherently heterogeneous works of art. A press release for the 2026 Biennial explains that “the exhibition foregrounds mood and texture,” as if it were a new line of clothing or interior decor, something that can be branded.

The men and women who run the Whitney, the New Museum, and other museums where the focus is on contemporary art want to figure out what the public wants. Artists find themselves regarded as team players; some may be superstars, but whoever they are, their work becomes part of some overarching theme or scheme. Curators, rightly or wrongly, have concluded that with the eclipse of modernism by postmodernism, the formal values that artists from Manet to Pollock so passionately embraced as fundamental are now marginal. This means there’s very little encouragement for museumgoers to even attempt to become, as Baudelaire would have it, “spontaneously artists.” Formal values are now seen as tactics, means to an end, neither foundational nor decisive.

We can all agree that we’re living in what the curators at the Whitney and the New Museum refer to as a period of darkness, trauma, and strife. What’s less clear, at least to me, is why this should leave some museumgoers feeling that whatever they find chaotic and confusing about “New Humans” and the 2026 Whitney Biennial is inevitable—a sign of the times. I wouldn’t be so quick to let the curators off the hook. These shows are designed to appeal to what Baudelaire regarded as the natural instincts of the public—the inclination to respond as “philosophers perhaps, moralists, engineers, connoisseurs of instructive anecdotes, whatever you like.”

One of the more striking galleries in “New Humans” is a long, narrow, dark space full of curious objects, many of them made in the 1960s. It’s called “Dream Machines,” and it amounts to a contemporary version of the Wunderkammern—cabinets of curiosities—that were assembled by kings, princes, and connoisseurs beginning in the Renaissance. “Dream Machines” includes shimmering sculptural objects, some of them kinetic, as well as curious wooden boxes, an odd hanging structure, and a number of early experiments with computers. If the 2026 Whitney Biennial is part of a genealogy that stretches back to the immense salons of the nineteenth century, “New Humans” has its origins in the international expositions of those years, which reflected some of the same scientific, sociological, and anthropological interests that had shaped the Wunderkammern of earlier centuries. What’s different today is that the optimism that fueled the old international expositions has been replaced by skepticism and ambivalence, a sense that futurism is now retrofuturism, the future now only a memory—“memories of the future,” as the subtitle of the New Museum show would have it. In “Dream Machines” the experimental art of the 1960s looks antiquated, almost quaint. I feel a related ambivalence or ambiguity in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, where basic and even primitive techniques, devices, and objects—papier-mâché, pinhole cameras, paper doilies—seem to offer a riposte to our fast-forward technology. You might say of “New Humans” and the 2026 Whitney Biennial what Théophile Thoré said of the Salon of 1844: “Where is art? Instead of art we find only industry.”