Abstract In 1953, when Walt Disney was looking to construct his first amusement park, he turned to a leading think tank to find him a suitable site for his venture, the Stanford Research Institute, whose “An Analysis of Location Factors for Disneyland” exemplified a distinctly Cold War aesthetic for how information was purposed, presented, and operationalized. The postwar think tank was tasked with communicating a complex host of research findings to aid the managerial class in their decision making, serving as a productive antagonist. The details of how this worked are of significance today because Disneyland was conceived alongside a new regime that continues to shape our present—a regime where our world, both physical and virtual, is operationalized through projections, trends, simulations, and feasibility studies aimed at optimizing returns, consumption, and the manufacture of happiness. During the early 1950s, the United States government had promoted the principle of industrial dispersion as a way of defending against atomic attack. By encouraging new, critical industries to avoid highly populated and highly industrialized areas, they sought to make these areas less attractive targets. In the Disneyland site report, the cartographic gestures of cutting, seaming, and overlaying that had been important to analysis in World War II were redeployed for commercial purposes. In identifying a site for Disneyland, Harrison “Buzz” Price at the Stanford Research Institute recalled that all the “data seemed to zero in on an area we called ‘the amoeba’ because of its irregular shape.” This “amoeba” was a methodological byproduct of the curvilinear forms produced by the dispersion surveys in outlining the boundaries of potential atom-bomb targets. In these curvilinear contours and visualization techniques, we see the emergence of an operationalized map that transformed Southern California into a landscape of numbers, trends, and statistics subject to tactical intervention. Disneyland's embrace of the think tank's methods speaks to the technocratic aspirations of a leisure industry seduced by the promises of the Cold War corporate apparatus. Between the atom and the amoeba, Disneyland would find its site in California's Orange County, where orange groves were razed to inaugurate the first site of leisure as a big business enterprise—a technological wonderland rooted on the principles of postwar automation, cybernetics, and operations research.
Abstract Paul Chan examines the concept of “content” as it has come to dominate contemporary cultural production, tracing its implications for art, expression, and human flourishing in the age of generative AI and the attention economy. Chan begins by observing the flattening effect of the term “content,” which collapses distinctions between artistic forms and privileges scalability and immediacy over quality and meaning. Drawing on traditional understandings of the distinction between form and content—from Plato's notions of mimesis and methexis to Adorno's conception of form as sedimented content—Chan maps the historical tensions between expression that endures and expression that is consumed in the moment. He then turns to Marx's “Fragment on Machines” and the concept of the general intellect to argue that what Marx failed to anticipate was the capacity of capital to exploit free time itself, converting leisure and attention into unwitting labor. Through the lens of the attention economy, Chan likens content to plastic: infinitely reproducible, derivative, and environmentally corrosive. The essay concludes by juxtaposing the current unprecedented proliferation of content—much of it AI-generated—against simultaneous political attacks on knowledge institutions, suggesting that the two phenomena are not contradictory but complementary symptoms of the same cultural crisis. Chan ultimately poses the question of whether art can still resist being mere content, and what is at stake in that resistance.
Abstract This essay by Antonio Somaini develops a critical theory of “latent spaces” — the compressed, vectorized mathematical substrates at the heart of contemporary AI models — and their impact on the ways in which the past is processed and interpreted. Opening with the Trump administration's AI-assisted purge of words and images from federal documents, alongside PragerU's production of deepfake videos for the White House's Founders Museum, Somaini argues that AI technologies are introducing a new regime of mediation that determines what can be seen, said, and known by encoding historical materials as vectors in abstract computational spaces. The article provides a technical and philosophical account of latent spaces as a new kind of Foucauldian historical a priori, comparing them with different understandings of the “archive” in its technical, institutional, and epistemological dimensions. Somaini then surveys a wide range of contemporary artistic practices — including works by Nouf Aljowaysir, Erik Bullot, Grégory Chatonsky, Taller Estampa, Alexander Kluge, Kevin B. Lee, Trevor Paglen, Gwenola Wagon, and Pierre Cassou-Noguès — that embody what he terms a “meta-archival impulse”: a critical desire to probe, expose, and resist the algorithmic processes through which AI models organize, transform, and sometimes erase historical materials. The essay concludes by arguing that the political challenge of our moment is twofold: developing critical methodologies for examining latent spaces as new infrastructures of memory and resisting the privatization of these meta-archives by a handful of hegemonic tech corporations.
Abstract People often only recognize their fundamental relationships with nonhuman beings by observing their absence. The eerie feeling they have these days that there is “nothing where there should be something” points to a loss that has not yet been fully realized as such. Against the backdrop of the sixth mass extinction of species, cultivating a sensitivity to the ghosts haunting the landscapes of the Anthropocene means confronting the reality of loss. In this essay, Juliane Rebentisch examines this realist twist on the motif of haunting in eco-critical discourse and discusses its consequences for a politics of mourning, examining the affective, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of species extinction and biodiversity loss and developing a framework for understanding and responding to this form of loss, which largely exceeds direct sensory experience. Beginning with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the concept of the ecological uncanny, Rebentisch argues that the perception of haunted landscapes — environments permeated by the traces of vanished human and nonhuman life — constitutes a politically and ethically significant mode of attunement to environmental destruction. Drawing on Mark Fisher's concept of the eerie as a “failure of presence,” and on eco-critical discourse around the Anthropocene as developed by Anna Tsing, Thom van Dooren, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, she argues that sensitivity to such haunted landscapes requires a radically interdisciplinary and non-exceptionalist rethinking of humanity's place within more-than-human ecological assemblages. But how to respond to this loss? Psychoanalysis helps distinguish between two ways, mourning and melancholia, and Rebentisch critically engages with the accounts of Freud and Judith Butler to propose the concept of “eco-melancholia”: a structural condition afflicting those who fail to register biodiversity loss because they do not recognize their libidinal and existential bonds to other species. Against this backdrop, Rebentisch advocates for a form of melancholia-tinged mourning that resists the logic of progress and replacement, remains faithful to the ghosts of the Anthropocene, and transforms loss into an ongoing ethical and political commitment to the more-than-human world.
Abstract A contribution to October's series Arts Communities at Risk, “Fake Estates” explores the systemic collapse of intersecting art worlds in the San Francisco Bay Area in the wake of the announced closure of California College of the Arts, its campus and facilities having been acquired by Nashville-based Vanderbilt University. The essay traces the demise of the 120-year-old art college to larger trends—the so-called “demographic cliff” augured by higher-education statisticians, a shrinking population of international students during the second Trump administration, and hapless gestures at incorporating artificial intelligence into an art school curriculum. It also narrates CCA's disastrous campus expansion project, which was funded by staggering debt, and a penchant among the school's trustees for blurring the lines between financial responsibility and private gain. It situates this travesty within a widening crisis in the region's art galleries and museums, many of which have announced diminished programs or hours, layoffs, and closures in recent years, and assesses recently announced alternative institutions—Art + Water, the Further Triennial, and the California Academy of Studio Arts—that hope to fill growing cracks in the city's arts ecosystem. In all these developments the author finds the pervasive distorting logic of financial speculation: the valuing of potential assets over existing cultures.
Abstract This tribute to Marian Goodman (1928–2026) traces her trajectory from her studies in pre-Columbian art history at Columbia University and the founding of Multiples Inc. in 1965 — a publishing venture devoted to democratizing access to art through reproducible works — to the opening of her eponymous New York gallery and its decades-long championing of Conceptual, post-Conceptual, and Arte Povera practices. Buchloh situates Goodman within the lineage of historically important gallerists, arguing that her achievement is comparable to that of figures such as Kahnweiler and Castelli in laying the groundwork for the reception of decisive moments in contemporary visual culture. Through a series of personal anecdotes involving artists—including Marcel Broodthaers, Gabriel Orozco, Steve McQueen, and Nairy Baghramian—the essay illuminates Goodman's extraordinary instinct, loyalty, and courage in supporting work that resisted commodification. Buchloh ultimately frames her legacy in dialectical terms: Goodman embodied the fundamental and now largely extinct tension between avant-garde artistic ambition and the economic structures of the art market, sustaining that contradiction with integrity throughout her career.
Abstract This article examines the development and cultural significance of NFT art in Russia, framing it through the sociological lens of “neo-structuration” theory — a framework that foregrounds individual agency as a driving force within evolving social and technological structures. The authors argue that NFTs have emerged in Russia as a means for young and independent artists to bypass state and institutional gatekeepers, access global audiences, and exercise creative autonomy in a context historically marked by collective identification and centralized cultural control. After introducing the technical workings of NFTs and their integration into both institutional and grassroots exhibition contexts, the article surveys three broad thematic tendencies in contemporary Russian NFT practice: explorations of the future of art and new forms of technologically mediated expression (exemplified by calligrapher Pokras Lampas); critical reflections on technology's impact on humanity (as in the work of AES+F and Aristarkh Chernyshev); and the deployment of NFTs in the service of social justice and charitable causes. Engaging critically with David Joselit's argument that NFTs reverse Duchamp's emancipatory gesture by re-commodifying freely available information, the authors nonetheless contend that the technology holds genuine democratic and transformative potential. The article concludes by noting the growing role of AI-generated imagery within this ecosystem and the broader implications of digitally mediated human agency for societal change.
Abstract “The Best of Both Worlds: Sherrie Levine Now” revisits Sherrie Levine's formative work in order to rethink the period's entrenched opposition between photographic appropriation and neo-expressionist painting. Taking as its point of departure Sherrie Levine: 1977–1988, curated by Scott Portnoy at the Aspen Art Museum in 2025, the essay situates Levine's emergence within a discursive field defined by the sharp binaries of photography versus painting, critique versus complicity, and women artists versus male artists. Long framed by critics (most influentially, Douglas Crimp) as a deconstructive repudiation of authorship, expressive immediacy, and painterly gesture, Levine's early appropriations were positioned as the antithesis of the market-driven resurgence of painting in the 1980s. However, such readings ultimately flattened the central contradictions, both affective and conceptual, that animated Levine's work from the beginning. Against this backdrop, her unexpected turn to painting in 1985 appears not as a betrayal of her earlier project but as a strategic reconfiguration of it—one that reintroduced contradiction at the level of medium, context, and identity. By interrogating the interpretive frameworks surrounding Levine's work and insisting on a closer engagement with its material and content, the essay reveals the antagonism between appropriation and expression to be a historically contingent fiction.
Abstract Alexander Kluge died on March 25 in Munich, where he had lived and worked for many years. Filmmaker, writer, philosopher, lawyer, interviewer, and artist, the polymathic Kluge was a major intellectual and creative presence in Germany for decades, but he is still not well known in the Anglophone world. October published a special issue on his work as long ago as 1988, and he wrote for these pages as recently as 2024 in a special issue on machine learning—just one more indication of his relentless curiosity, into his nineties, about new media and the critical concepts necessary to address them. October was headed to press when we learned of his death, so we asked two of his American friends to reflect on his life and work as speedily as possible: Ben Lerner, whose poetry inspired Kluge to write some of his sui generis prose pieces, which in turn inspired further poems by Lerner; and Michael W. Jennings, co-author of the definitive critical biography of Walter Benjamin, who is at work on a similar volume on Kluge. With the passing of Kluge just eleven days after the death of Jürgen Habermas, an era in critical thinking has come to a close, but this threshold is also an invitation to rediscover one of the most capacious minds of the past century, for whom critique and imagination always went hand in hand. ––Hal Foster, for the Editors
Abstract Shortly before his untimely death in 2019, aged 55, curator Okwui Enwezor asked art historian and critical theorist Terry Smith, a longtime friend and close collaborator, to collect a representative sample of his published writings, then scattered in catalogues, journals, magazines, and online. In this conversation, curator Naomi Beckwith and art historians Huey Copeland and Pamela M. Lee talk with Smith about his editorship of the resultant two volumes of texts by Enwezor, published in 2025 by Duke University Press and the Sharjah Art Foundation. Together, they reflect on the nature of Enwezor's achievement as a post-colonial, “world-picturing” thinker who was hyper alert to the operations of “history in the present.” They explore his curatorial strategies in key exhibitions and assess the current relevance of his practice. Volume 1 of Okwui Enwezor: Selected Writings: Towards a New African Art Discourse begins with his programmatic editorial for the first issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, which he, Chika Okeke-Agulu, and Salah Hassan, co-founded in New York in 1994. The volume includes essays from landmark exhibitions including In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996), the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes: History and Geography (1997), The Short Century: Independence Movements in Africa 1945-1994 (2001), and Documenta11 (2002), as well as essays on individual artists such as Georges Adéagbo, Ellen Gallagher, and Lorna Simpson. Texts such as “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition” (2003) embody his efforts to develop a discursive framework for artists from Africa and its widespread diaspora, and to demonstrate the impact of their art on the wider world. The second volume, Curating the Postcolonial Condition, collects essays from exhibitions such as his 2006 Seville Biennial The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society through Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument (2008), All The World's Futures at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–65 (2016) to the posthumous Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (2002). Critical essays on, and interviews with, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Kendell Geers, William Kentridge, Frank Bowling, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Akomfrah, and Nari Ward exemplify his commitment to the pivotal role of individual artists such as these.
The AA subway train to Harlem. I clutch my mother's sleeve, her arms full of shopping bags, christmas-heavy. The wet smell of winter clothes, the train's lurching. My mother spots an almost seat, pushes my little snowsuited body down. On one side of me a man reading a paper. On the other, a woman in a fur hat staring at me. Her mouth twitches as she stares and then her gaze drops down, pulling mine with it. Her leather-gloved hand plucks at the line where my new blue snowpants and her sleek fur coat meet. She jerks her coat close to her. I look. I do not see whatever terrible thing she is seeing on the seat between us-probably a roach. But she has communicated her horror to me. . . . And suddenly I realize there is nothing crawling up the seat between us; it is me she doesn't want her coat to touch. . . . Something's going on here I do not understand, but I will never forget it. Her eyes. The flared nostrils. The hate.
Abstract This essay challenges established art-historical interpretations of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Tower of Babel motif by arguing that it does not straightforwardly address themes of hubristic construction, vain ambition, or technological progress, but instead stages a logic of negation. This claim is developed through Guy Debord's appropriation of the motif in the 1973 film adaptation of his book The Society of the Spectacle. Produced in the aftermath of the Watts uprising and May 1968—amid deindustrialization, urban rebellion, and a deepening economic crisis—Debord's cinematic montage reframes Bruegel's tower as a sign of imperial exhaustion. Rather than illustrating a settled theory of the society of the spectacle, Debord's use of Bruegel becomes the starting point for a theory of art abolitionism, drawn from the historical avant-garde, French ultraleft communism, and black radical thought. Situating Bruegel in Watts, this essay proposes, is a catalyst for rethinking the historical limits of the avant-garde project and its encounter with a new revolutionary horizon.
The term “Neue Sachlichkeit” was codified 100 years ago, through an exhibition curated by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, and quickly came to signify a “contemporary middle-class art.” Critics then and since have often, in turn, attributed to Neue Sachlichkeit painting a middle-class politics, that is, a politics of cynical resignation, congruent with the period's rising conservatism as well as the art's apparent commitment to outmoded, even regressive, forms and techniques. But many of the figures who theorized Neue Sachlichkeit at its outset—painters including Otto Dix and Georg Scholz, critics such as Franz Roh and Paul Westheim, not to mention Hartlaub himself—insisted on the art's dynamic, not affirmative, relationship to the past. To support their theories, the artists and critics made implicit (and sometimes explicit) reference to theories of history drawn from the period's art-historical literature—by scholars including Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, and Wilhelm Pinder—and that betrayed, too, acknowledgment of their nation's uneven development in social, technical, and artistic terms. Testing contemporaneous theories of history against paintings associated with Neue Sachlichkeit (by Dix, Scholz, and Georg Schrimpf), I demonstrate that this so-called “return to order” must be understood, rather, as an art enmeshed in the questions and contingencies that surround historical “returns” in the first place, namely in Germany of the 1920s but also, in a concluding section, in Germany and beyond in the present.
Benjamin Buchloh: As these conversations generally start, which origin stories and beginnings do you consider worth mentioning?
Starting with his earliest works of 1966, Mel Bochner developed a set of processual and translational operations that function simultaneously as method and theoretical apparatus, working to dismantle the persistent mythologies of linguistic transparency. His Transduction (1969–2025), which carries a text through six successive translations, epitomizes how language can be submitted to unfathomable contingencies. While Bochner's work has been repeatedly interpreted through the prism of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and a dematerialized reception of Conceptualism, the present text seeks rather to examine the ways in which his practice parallels the conceptual displacements enacted by Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes and how the materiality of thoughts necessarily exists within sustaining supports. In this sense, Bochner's work may be understood as elaborating not merely a meta-linguistic investigation, but a genuine theory of translation that reconfigures the relation between linguistic system, visual production, and the contingent conditions of the creation of meaning itself. At a moment when the very category of truth is continually compromised, and when the convergent logics of totalitarian techno-political power increasingly saturate the field of public discourse, a sustained engagement with Bochner's critical practice is crucial for sharpening our theoretical tools.
