Is it always too late for art?

Many classic works of art from the 20th century Part of the reason they were considered important was that they were ahead of their time, from Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to Andy Warhol’s silkscreens. Marshall McLuhan’s medieval assertion that art functions as a “long-range early warning system…tells us[ing] What’s happening to old cultures”—encapsulates the common belief in the predictive value of art. But the era of traditional art media being able to tell us about the future may have mostly passed.

Although art can still play a pioneering role in the early 21st century, the pace of change in mainstream culture has accelerated dramatically. On social media and in the news, throngs of people are busy covering its every move. Keeping up with the present—let alone surpassing it—has become more difficult than ever, and any forward-thinking artwork today is bound to differ from that of the past.

My hunch is that contemporary works of art that are most likely to one day appear prescient, albeit not always in a reassuring way, will emerge from hyper-artistic digital practices, whether artistic experiments with artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence; so-called red-chip art (Anne Armstrong Art Network News defined as works with a flashy aesthetic that abandons art history); or folk forms such as NFTs, memes, or TikTok legend videos. What these practices have in common is not only that they are relatively new and closely tied to digital culture, but that under our inherited value systems they are only considered great art to some extent, if not art at all. Traditionalists often rightfully lament the ethical and aesthetic challenges posed by AI art, the kitsch of red-chip art, or the simplicity of digital folk art. But practices like this are telling the old culture what’s going on with it, even if the message isn’t what most art viewers want to hear.

What about all the paintings, sculptures, photography, videos and performances that people still enjoy making and watching? They’re not going away, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to create fine art in these media while staying at the forefront of cultural discourse. In her book 2024 confusion of attentionClaire Bishop notes that contemporary artworks “are often symptoms of larger conditions rather than fortune tellers of expectations” because “the world is changing faster, more brutally, even beyond the ability of artists to understand.” The cycle of conception, production, and curation is much slower than online discussion, which explains why some very online artists like Artie Vierkant, Joshua Citarella, and Brad Troemel have pivoted from making art in the 2010s to 2020. era of art-related content creation, which explains the COVID-19 lockdown and the precarious economics of art creation. Some artists, galleries and museums still try to set or chase trends, and a small number of these works may one day prove to be ahead of their time. But when the cultural conversation is moving so fast, pursuing predictive artistic relevance seems like a fool’s errand. In particular, the museum is entering the horse-drawn carriage into a NASCAR race.

Artists and curators, then, might be wise to accept their inevitable tardiness. The prescient stories cultural workers tell about the visual arts contribute to the romance of the field, justifying our purpose beyond superficial pleasures. Today, when it is harder than ever for art to function as a leading indicator, it is worth examining how some art functions as a lagging indicator—showing the viewer not where a culture is going but where it has been.

Art as a lagging indicator It may not sound as glamorous as avant-garde predictions, but it has its advantages and can help viewers cope with cultural changes that may be difficult to accept or even keep up with. This effective lag is perhaps most evident in recent art about climate change. Unlike the earliest ecological art experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, when scientific and popular understanding of man-made climate change was still in its infancy, contemporary climate art does not serve the purpose of avant-garde awareness-raising. The best recent ecological work attempts to do something else: present incomprehensible, tangible phenomena.

Edward Burtynsky’s dazzling aerial photographs of the scars left by human industry are on display in “The Great Acceleration,” a retrospective at the International Center of Photography. His images of polluted waterways, converted mines and vast expanses of waste are disorienting in scale. They make it exciting to look out the window of an airplane and see Earth as an alien mosaic of colors and textures. These landscapes depict vast man-made changes to the Earth that are often invisible and absent-minded. Their aesthetic wonder heightens the horror of viewers who witness not only our species’ collateral damage to ecology, but also our alienation from it. These artworks speak the language of fact and emotion, depicting things we know, at least abstractly, but with a visual allure that is palpable.

Many recent eco-conscious artworks also use time lag to create emotional impact. Athena LaTocha’s huge Immediately afterwards… (2021) incorporates shellac, earth from Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, demolition debris, and lead castings of exposed rock into a 55-foot-long abstraction that evokes geological formations. Its blend of natural and built materials leaves traces of contemporary urban development over a long period of time, demonstrating that our species cannot avoid being forgotten in the long term. Michael Wang is smart Extinct in New York (2019) shows plants that once grew wild in New York City but now no longer grow. The live plants on display at the Governors Island Art Center are housed in a greenhouse that, despite being hermetically closed, appears incongruously bright and airy, akin to an assisted living facility.

Climate artworks like this one depict the past to help viewers cope with the uncomfortable constraints of the present. They show us the challenging path to getting the planet into its current state without explicitly proposing a future—perhaps because it feels too late to achieve change on the necessary scale, or perhaps because 20th-century utopianism now appears to have failed. When climate art does depict the future, it often imagines it in terms of what might be lost: the artwork is an anticipatory elegy rather than a cutting-edge prediction.

Olafur Eliasson’s “Ice Watch” (2014-19) series is a prime example of this. First implemented in Copenhagen, Paris, and London, these installations consist of giant blocks of ice (each weighing more than 80 tons) placed in public squares; the melting blocks continue to shrink and become misshapen, serving as a stark reminder that time is running out to mitigate man-made climate change. Yet these needlessly repetitive devices, as if to compensate for the futility of the gesture, are more effective as epistemological allegories than environmental allegories. Eliasson wanted to confront civilization with mysterious harbingers of its disintegration, wishing the ice cubes would smell like salt; instead, they presented visitors with an oppressive climatic fatalism. The most telling photos in the series are close-ups of pedestrians hugging and kissing the ice, as if saying their final goodbyes. These tender moments dramatize what happens when intellectual understanding of climate change gives way to the emotional impact of witnessing its practical effects.

Most people experience climate change in an alienating way, and visual art excels at undermining this: art can convey embodied knowledge even if viewers are not allowed to touch the work. Lin Ying’s ghost forest (2021) elegantly demonstrated this principle. The artist planted 49 bare cedar trees on the central lawn of New York City’s busy Madison Square Park that had been moved from their original locations due to flooding by the sea. Like Eliasson’s ice cubes, Lin’s trees are a metonym for worsening environmental losses. But everyday park activities alongside Lin’s apocalyptic symbols show how easily people can adjust to their sense of normalcy. We already live with such loss, even if art is sometimes needed to remember that fact.

And artists like Lin and Wang Play Since it’s always too late for art, other artists turn to quasi-art forms for prediction. Before disbanding in 2016, K-Hole (Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Chris Sherron, Emily Segal and Dena Yago) monitored the cultural hype cycle like a doctor monitoring a patient in an intensive care unit. “In L.A., you’re always late,” one section begins. K-Hole #5: Report on Doubt (2015), the fifth and final publication of the trend forecasting art collective. “You wake up to hundreds of unread emails, 70 unread group text messages.” That hamster wheel feeling of never being able to catch up may have a special feel to West Coast mornings, but now it’s a familiar feeling everywhere.

K-Hole’s annual report, available free as a PDF, takes the form of a consumer forecast report circulated within the ad agency; the PDF’s fashion-inspired imagery and breezy, intellectual tone sometimes verges on parody, but ultimately comes across as sincere. This idea—trend forecasting for aesthetic rather than commercial purposes—was ahead of its time, but not similar to what most people thought of as visual art then or now. Its Hermit Crab Habitat is an otherwise conservative form of enterprise, with collective slide presentations and dissemination through traditional gallery exhibitions and non-traditional digital means, yet to be metabolized into the institutional fine arts ecosystem. Instead, this style of work has resurfaced in the form of monetizable digital content, such as artist-turned-content creator Brad Troemel’s cultural reports, which Patreon subscribers can view as slideshow video articles.

K-Hole’s reporting anticipates the future by drawing on the recent past and extrapolating from important cultural developments to speculate on its emerging impact. The subtitle of their first report was K-Hole #1: Fragment MOREtation (2011), derived from Duffy’s 2010 subway advertising campaign. In the same report, they discussed Venmo, which was so novel at the time that the now-ubiquitous app begged for explanation. While many climate art pieces tend to be late in their own right, K-Hole’s report attempts to minimize it. The team’s crystal ball approach is to track trends closely and comprehensively so that they can be among the first to document when and why the atmosphere changes.

Some works of contemporary art will continue to intentionally anticipate changes in the atmosphere, while others will continue to be accidentally prescient. However, most traditional arts media and communication methods have not been able to keep up with the speed of this shift and cultural adaptation to it. K-Hole prefigured this dynamic and has been somewhat a victim of its own success, as reading cultural tea leaves to learn about new micro-trends has become a common pastime in mainstream news and social media, precluding collective influence. The cultural need for immediacy poses little problem for artists who are not concerned with temporality but oriented toward the distant past or the transhuman future. But for artists focused on the here and now, embracing fashion lateness can be liberating.