I could list qualities

I could list qualities I love to see in art — synesthetics, pure Pop magic, irony, experimentation, brilliance, precision, the unexpected — or suggest what’s needed on a basic level: cheaper rents, studio space, time to be in it, health coverage, funded exhibition spaces, supported smaller galleries, a magazine, a public.

But maybe a different question is presently at stake. Instead of “What does art need right now?”, one could ask, “What does need art right now?” Does anything need art right now?

I don’t mean to assert that art-making is frivolous. I mean to ask, aside from the smaller communities that art-making sustains, what forces are instrumentalizing it or interested in making use of it these days?

In the 2000s, even “global contemporary art” seemed to have some organic relation to a discourse, social condition, field, or subculture. In the 2010s, the art market cleaved from this residual integration; prices rose and corporate galleries consolidated assets. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, contemporary art’s institutions, particularly in the US, increasingly served as a progressive pool for the Democratic Party and for capital. But coalitions underwriting that era have been crumbling since October 7 and dissipating somewhat in the face of the Dems’ second loss to Trump, while programming seems to continue for the time being as if on autopilot.

Contemporary art looks stranded, and the ways forward aren’t clear. Resources and sustainable spaces for artistic and discursive production are scarce and getting scarcer. The horizon for artists’ and art’s material needs is bleak. Tech power isn’t interested. Public funding is revoked. What will a new era of neglect for art bring? At the risk of sounding naïve, I do think art is a medium for futurity of the best kind, and that it will continue to be. In this sense, we don’t know the answer to what it needs.