From Object to Occasion: What Art Becomes After the Movements End

A woman in a long gown sits at a bare wooden table and does not move. Across from her, one at a time, strangers lower themselves into the opposite chair. Most last a few minutes. Some stay for hours. A surprising number of them, for reasons they cannot quite explain afterward, begin to weep—while she only looks back, offering nothing but the whole of her attention. This was Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 2010, sitting motionless for seven hundred and thirty-six hours, the entire time the museum was open, meeting in the end the eyes of 1,565 separate people. In the final month they carried the table away, so that nothing stood between the artist and the stranger but a meter of lit air. There was no object in the room. Nothing to buy, nothing to frame, nothing a camera could keep that would hold what passed between two faces. The most discussed artwork of its year was not a thing at all.

Hold that image; we are going to travel a long way from it and come back. Elsewhere on this site you can read the century that runs from Courbet’s laborers to Warhol’s soup cans as a kind of seismograph—realism giving way to impressionism, to cubism, to surrealism, to abstraction, to pop, each movement toppling the last, the whole line trembling with the mind’s slow loss of certainty. That story ends, more or less, at postmodernism. This one begins where it stops. From realism to postmodernism, art moved by succession: there was always a next, always a coming thing that would overthrow the reigning one and take the throne. And then, somewhere in the 1990s, the succession simply stalled. Not because art stopped being made—more of it is made now than ever—but because the next stopped arriving. What actually developed since, and whether we are even asking the right question when we ask what comes after, is the knot I want to work loose.

The Movements That Were Not Movements

It was not, at first, that the naming stopped. If anything the naming went into overdrive. In 1998 the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud published Esthétique relationnelle—relational aesthetics—and quietly detonated the oldest assumption in the room: that an artwork is an object. For a set of artists who had come up in Europe in the early nineties, he argued, the work was no longer the thing on the wall but the encounter between people it set going. Rirkrit Tiravanija cooked pans of Thai food and served it, free, to anyone who wandered into the gallery; the art was the meal, the talk, the small temporary society that formed around the pot. A decade on, Bourriaud tried again with a second coinage, the altermodern, headlining the 2009 Tate Triennial with the claim that globalization had bred a new kind of artist—a nomad, drifting between cultures and eras, finished with the modern and the postmodern alike.

The coinages kept coming, faster than anyone could shelve them. In 2010 two Dutch theorists, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, named the mood of the young century metamodernism—an oscillation, they said, between modern sincerity and postmodern irony, a pendulum that swings toward hope, catches itself, swings back toward doubt, and never settles. Their prefix came from Plato’s metaxis, the condition of being in two places at once. Others reached the other way. As early as 2000 the painters Billy Childish and Charles Thomson had published a manifesto for remodernism, damning postmodernism as spiritually bankrupt and calling, with an almost embarrassing straight face, for a return of spirit and vision to art. And running beneath all of it was hauntology—a word Derrida had coined in 1993, which the critics Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds turned on the culture around 2006 to name a peculiar new grief: art haunted by lost futures, homesick for tomorrows that were promised and never came.

Then there was everything the network did to seeing. Already in 1999 the art historian Rosalind Krauss had announced a post-medium condition, in which the old certainty of the medium—this is a painting, that is a sculpture—had dissolved. The musician Kim Cascone, in 2000, named a post-digital aesthetics of failure, where the glitch and the crash and the digital artifact became the material itself. By the mid-2000s the artist Marisa Olson was making work she called post-internet—art made not on the web but after it, in a world the web had already finished rewiring. A critic’s blog and a young artist named Artie Vierkant hardened the phrase into a movement across 2009 and 2010. And in 2011 James Bridle began gathering, on a Tumblr, the odd spillage he called the New Aesthetic: satellite glitches, pixelation, the vision of machines leaking back out of the screen and into the physical world.

And then the market had its fever. In March 2021 Christie’s brought the hammer down on a JPEG—a digital collage by the artist known as Beeple, Everydays: The First 5000 Days—for sixty-nine million dollars, the first purely digital work the house had ever auctioned. For one delirious season the crypto-art boom made it seem the future had a price and the price was climbing. Then it went off a cliff: by late 2022 the trading volume in these tokens had collapsed by something like ninety-seven percent from its peak. And as that bubble hissed flat, a larger force arrived to dwarf all of it—the generative image models, DALL-E and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, all landing within a few months of 2022, and with them a world in which any picture at all could be summoned from a typed sentence in seconds. I will not linger on what the machines mean for the human hand; another essay here does exactly that. I want only the bare fact on the table: the image became infinite.

We kept naming the next movement out of muscle memory, long after the thing the name was for had gone.

The Wall That Is Not There

Now step back from that list and look at its shape, because the shape is the whole argument. What is strange about it is not that it is long. It is that the items are simultaneous. Cubism did not share the stage with surrealism as an equal; it gave way to it, was overthrown by it, in the orderly patricide by which art history used to move. But metamodernism does not overthrow relational aesthetics. Post-internet does not depose hauntology. Remodernism and the New Aesthetic and the altermodern and crypto-art are not a sequence at all—they are all simply on at once, overlapping, contradicting, none of them reigning, none of them next. The line has become a scatter. And a scatter has no direction, which means it can have no successor, which means the question we keep reflexively asking—what comes after this?—has quietly lost its object.

A philosopher saw it coming. Arthur Danto argued that art’s grand story—its master narrative, the long march of styles each superseding the last—had in fact ended back in the 1960s, and that everything since belongs to a post-historical age: objectively pluralistic, gloriously without direction, no single way forward because every way is open at once. There is a hard logic under the sentiment. The avant-garde was never merely a run of styles; it was a war machine, and a war machine needs a wall to breach—an academy, an establishment, a reigning orthodoxy to be scandalously against. Postmodernism was the last -ism because it was the one that pulled the wall down. Once you have announced that there is no master narrative, no movement can overthrow you, because you have already conceded everything and handed out permission for anything. And you cannot rebel against permission.

You cannot rebel against the permission to do anything.

So the -ism was never really a style. It was a shape of time—linear, progressive, generational, each cohort climbing onto the shoulders of the one before and shouting at it to make it new. That shape had a source: the machine age, the manifesto, the military metaphor buried in the very word avant-garde, the advance guard, the troops sent out ahead. It assumed a single front line that the whole culture faced together. The network has no front line. On the feed, fifty aesthetics trend in the same hour; a teenager in Lagos, a curator in Berlin, and a diffusion model humming in a data center all pour images into the same scrolling column at the same instant, from no center, toward no next. To ask what comes after postmodernism is to ask which soldier stands at the front of an army that has dissolved into a crowd facing every direction at once.

“Make it new.”—Ezra Pound

From the Noun to the Verb

So let us refuse the question. Not what does the next movement look like—there is no next movement, and no line for it to stand at the end of—but the older and harder question the movements let us dodge: what is art actually for, once the parade has broken up and gone home? And here, oddly, the scattered signals begin to point one way. Three separate pressures, arriving from three directions, lean toward the same destination.

The first pressure is that the image is now free. Post-internet art already felt it: we no longer stand before images, we swim in them, a billion a day, sourceless and weightless. Then the generative models finished the job. When a Rembrandt-that-never-was arrives in seconds from a typed sentence, when any picture at all can be conjured for the cost of a breath, the image stops being the scarce thing. This is the fact the other essay wrestles with, and I will leave the wrestling to it. I need only the consequence: value drains out of the picture, and value, like water, has to go somewhere. The only question worth asking is where it pools.

The NFT told us where—by failing. Strip off the speculation and crypto-art was a genuinely ingenious attempt to solve precisely this problem: to make the digital image scarce again, to manufacture rarity where physics had abolished it. The blockchain was a machine for minting certified originals of things that could be copied perfectly, endlessly, at no cost. A sixty-nine-million-dollar file that anyone could right-click and save; the only thing you owned was a line in a ledger swearing your copy was the true one. It collapsed—ninety-seven percent—because you cannot counterfeit the scarcity of an image. The market discovered, at staggering expense, that the one thing that cannot be copied is not a file. It is a moment. A presence. A here.

And the third pressure has been building the longest: a hunger for sincerity that irony can no longer shout down. Look again at what relational aesthetics actually did—it took the work off the wall and set it in the space between people, made the encounter itself the medium. Look at what metamodernism named: the swing back toward feeling after knowingness went hollow. Look at what remodernism begged for, clumsily, unfashionably—spirit, meaning, the sacred. We file these as separate movements, but they are the same animal in different coats: a reaching, past the protective quotation marks, for something that actually touches. For contact. For the real, offered without a wink.

Put the three pressures together and they do not describe a new style. They describe a migration. Art is moving from the object to the occasion—from the noun to the verb. The center of gravity is sliding off the made thing and onto the made moment: the encounter, the shared attention, the proof that a particular human being was here, once, doing this, and that it cannot be undone or duplicated or downloaded. Not a new -ism but a new unit—no longer the movement but the situation, no longer the picture but the presence. This is why the question of what comes next kept coming up empty. We were scanning the horizon for another object, when the whole action had already slipped over into the verb.

You can already feel where the aliveness has gone. It is in performance, in installation, in the durational and the participatory and the site-specific—the un-photographable arts, the ones that punish reproduction, that only fully exist if you were in the room. And, at the opposite pole, it is in the stubborn return to the crafts that cannot be faked: the thrown pot, the letterpress page, the hand-pulled print, the object whose entire worth is the friction of a life having passed through it. The ephemeral and the handmade look like opposites, but they are placing the same bet—that in a world drowning in perfect copies, the scarce and holy thing is the trace of a person. Not the image of the mark. The fact of it.

Which brings us back, at last, to the woman at the table. Remember that in the final month they took the table away, and left only two chairs and a meter of air, and still the people came—queuing through the night, sitting down, weeping in front of a stranger who did nothing but look back. Nothing was made there. Nothing was sold, nothing changed hands, nothing could be saved to a phone that would survive the walk to the door. And that—not the record-breaking file, not the next movement that is never going to arrive—is the shape of what comes next: art you cannot download, because the art was never the image. It was the being-there. It always had been. We are only now, half-drowned in pictures, beginning to remember it.