Editorial

The 1910s were the decade of manifestos: bold proclamations of what is to be done, of how artists can contribute to the creation of a new society, of how art must be revolutionized to anticipate modernity’s promises and threats. A moment of great upheaval was in need of great game, and artists self-fashioned themselves as aesthetic, moral, and political vanguards. Critics, in contrast, remained in the rear guard during that time, observing their peers from afar, mostly not understanding what exactly was happening at the frontlines, reacting either with confusion or angry outbursts at the naivete of their peers impatiently pressing ahead.
Dynamics have changed. If anything, critics and their newfound frenemies, the curators with their almighty power of the wall label, have reinvented themselves as a moral and political vanguard. Manifestos have vanished altogether, and I am not nostalgic for the genre. The closest we have come to it in recent times was probably the executive order on “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” updated in 2025, which attempts to impose a new age of state-powered Neoclassicism on an art market still enthralled by a realism of the individual. Both options are a hard sell, but it seems equally difficult to articulate in simple and precise terms what we want from art instead. A romantic celebration of perseverance? An exuberant display of marginality in the face of disaster? A secession into art’s specific properties? An incessant barrage of moral provocations?
Not in a place to formulate a manifesto, we opted instead for its sibling, the survey. Asking others to respond to a single question is a proven approach: You do it to spark the “Olympian quarrels,” as Vanity Fair put it in 1928. This may be met with outright hostility, as in Dye’s 1942 “Inquiry on Dialectical Materialism,” where respondents launched long diatribes about the absurdity of the questions and insisted they must be rebuked. Or the question may result in more questions, as when New Masses asked, “Are Artists People?” You do it to evince positioning, to crystallize thought into opinion, to create a chart for your desires. Our question was simple:
What does art need right now?
Over recent months, we’ve gathered responses from artists, writers, historians, critics, and gallerists invested in this question — voices whose perspectives we deeply value or particularly wanted to hear. Like Stanley Brouwn’s “This Way Brouwn,” the result is a starting point, more an idea of direction than the actual roadmap.