'New Humans' And The Strange End Of Contemporary Art As We Know It

(MENAFN- USA Art News) New Museum's“New Humans” Looks Less Like Tech Panic and More Like a Modernist Time Machine

A concrete figure raises a phone as if it were a ritual object. Nearby, a pristine white sculpture translates a patent drawing into something that reads like a warning label for the workplace. If“New Humans: Memories of the Future” sounds like it might be a brisk survey of contemporary tech dread, the New Museum's new exhibition takes a more oblique route - and, in the process, makes a surprisingly forceful case for Modernism's continued grip on how institutions picture“the future.”

The show's stated premise is expansive: to consider what it means to be human amid sweeping technological change. Yet the most literal references to today's tech discourse appear only in flashes, and they arrive with a kind of frozen calm. German artist Judith Hopf's (b. 1969)“Phone User 5” (2021–22) is a blobby, concrete selfie-taker, its mass and stillness turning a familiar gesture into something faintly geological. New Zealand artist Simon Denny's (b. 1982)“Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual King Island Brown Thornbill cage (US 9,280,157 B2: 'System and method for transporting personnel within an active workspace', 2016)” (2019) reimagines an alarming, cage-like workstation concept once patented by Amazon - a project the company later abandoned.

Those works nod toward the present, but“New Humans” quickly reveals itself as a broader meditation on“visions of the future,” a category so roomy that it can absorb almost any act of imaginative projection. The exhibition moves through rooms that touch on architecture, on the fantasy of becoming-animal, and on a substantial amount of surreal-leaning contemporary painting that, at times, feels more atmospheric than argumentative.

Then the exhibition's real center of gravity comes into focus: the 20th century. To a striking degree,“New Humans” is a show about Modernism - about the“tradition of the new” that shaped artists working through the upheavals of a century ago, and about how that experimental posture continues to serve as a template for thinking through the transformations of our own moment.

The historical roster is explicit. One room gathers works by Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), Spanish artist Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), and German-born artist Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927). Elsewhere, the exhibition nods to Constructivist and Situationist approaches to architecture, positioning built space as both a social instrument and a speculative medium.

A key section revisits and expands The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)'s 1959 exhibition“New Images of Man,” a landmark attempt to picture the human figure under the pressures of the nuclear age and decolonization. In the New Museum's restaging, the emphasis falls on Modern art's capacity to register historical intensity through distortion and violent abstraction, with artists ranging from Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) to Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi (b. 1930).

The curatorial sensibility behind the whole - a poetic blend of scientific imagery, curiosities, and canonical art across eras - will be familiar to followers of New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni. The exhibition's refinement is less about tidy categories than about mood, pacing, and the conviction that the“specific and the special” can carry meaning across time. It's a difficult balancing act: to be deliberately indifferent to genre and chronology while still producing a coherent emotional and intellectual atmosphere. Here, that approach largely holds.

What makes“New Humans” especially resonant is what it suggests about the New Museum itself. When curator Marcia Tucker founded the institution in 1977, it positioned itself against a Modernism that had hardened into orthodoxy - a museum for art whose history was still being written. Today, the New Museum continues to brand itself as a dedicated home for contemporary art. Yet“New Humans” advances its argument by looking backward as much as forward, treating Modernism not as a closed chapter but as a living toolkit for imagining what comes next.

In that sense, the exhibition's title lands with a quiet twist: the“new humans” are, in many ways, the old humans - and the future arrives not as a clean break, but as a set of recurring questions, reframed under new pressures.

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