1. On Lateness and “Late Fascism” When news of Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden rally broke, the historians were ready. Not that much editorializing was required, for the image archive told the story in the bluntest terms. Black-and-white photographs pictured the German American Bund staging its “Pro American Rally” in the same arena in 1939, complete with a monumental portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas, a low point in a movement full of them: It had featured, in 1937, Nazi sympathizers goose-stepping down the Upper East Side. A dispiriting and obvious lesson followed: The contemporary US electorate ignores—has ignored—fascism's history at its peril. So, is it now too late to interrogate fascism's regional inflection in the United States as its own sick brand of homegrown nativism? Or might lateness itself provide an opening, however small, to gain some traction on the present moment? To view Trump's rally as shocking—as a radical mutation of the nation's history—is to subscribe to a peculiar genre of American exceptionalism: that fascism can't or indeed hasn't already happened here. It is also to sidestep the ugly reality of November 2024 as a cracked mirror to January 1933. The NSDAP came to power legally, after all; Trump won his second term in office democratically. For both historians and the historically amnesiac alike, however, the risk of such analogies is their inducement of a virtual stasis. Are we stuck in a historical feedback loop from which there is no escape?

October distributed a questionnaire about Global Methods, asking the following: “Coming to terms with global modernisms and global contemporary art calls for an understanding of the different histories, social functions, and aesthetic genealogies that inform art of the 20th and 21st centuries in different localities throughout the world. Is the ‘comparative’ method (foundational in art history, elaborated in comparative literature) adequate anymore to the questions raised by global modernisms and contemporary art? Or are other critical categories or tools such as entanglement, assemblage, or intimacy more appropriate? Western art history's primary tools—formal analysis and nation-, community-, or subject-inflected historicization—carry inherently imperial hierarchies that tend to inscribe value judgments and artificially consolidate categories like race and nation. To build a genuinely global art history thus requires more than addressing an expanded archive. It also demands new theoretical perspectives founded in diverse ‘local’ values and functions of art as well as attending to the distortions that occur when they encounter one another in global circulation. What models for doing so have you developed in your work? What are their advantages and disadvantages? How can we expand our understanding of the global condition by proposing multiple models of modernity and their complex interrelationships?” The following authors responded: Zainab Bahranì, Peter Brunt, Zirwat Chowdhury, Iftikhar Dadi, Nikolas Drosos, Jaś Elsner, Finbarr Barry Flood, Gao Minglu, Atreyee Gupta, Jonathan Hay, Wu Hung, Jennifer Josten, Joan Kee, Anneka Lenssen, and Steven Nelson.

Modern and contemporary art have redefined the relationship between information and matter. Whether in the readymade's scrambling of the categories of art and commodity or Conceptual art's translation of matter into information, the artwork is embedded in a dynamic multi-media discourse. The NFT, or non-fungible-token, reverses this long genealogy of contemporary art by hijacking the category of art as nothing more than a tool for designing a new asset class, ripe for exuberant speculation. In short, the readymade—whose purpose was to demonstrate the fungibility of artworks when shifted from one discursive category to another—has been reversed.

The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum's structural relation to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its historical point of reference, the word's emphatic return is rhetorically powerful, and it corresponds to a parallel interest among scholars in a plural field of postcolonial or global modernisms. The exhortation to decolonize, however, is not uncontroversial-some believe it still carries a Eurocentric bias. Indeed, it has been proposed that, for the West, de-imperialization is perhaps even more urgent than decolonization. What does the term decolonize mean to you in your work in activism, criticism, art, and/or scholarship? Why has it come to play such an urgent role in the neoliberal West? How can we link it historically with the political history of decolonization, and how does it work to translate postcolonial theory into a critique of the neocolonial contemporary art world? Respondents include Nana Adusei-Poku, Brook Andrew, Sampada Aranke, Ian Bethell-Bennett, Kader Attia, Andrea Carlson, Elise Y. Chagas, ISUMA, Iftikhar Dadi, Janet Dees, Nitasha Dhillon, Hannah Feldman, Josh T. Franco, David Garneau, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Arnold J. Kemp, Thomas Lax, Nancy Luxon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Saloni Mathur, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Alan Michelson, Partha Mitter, Isabela Muci Barradas, Steven Nelson, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Alessandro Petti, Paulina Pineda, Christopher Pinney, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ryan Rice, Andrew Ross, Paul Chaat Smith, Nancy Spector, Francoise Verges, Rocio Zambrana, and Joseph R. Zordan.

A wide-ranging conversation between artist Amy Sillman, Museum of Modern Art curator Michelle Kuo, and October editor David Joselit on Sillman's influential Artist's Choice exhibition, The Shape of Shape , presented in the reopening of MoMA's galleries in 2019. Topics range from the re-introduction of intuition into histories of contemporary painting to strategies for expanding the modernist canon.

Establishing a connection between the novel coronavirus pandemic and the viral spread of misinformation emanating from the Trump administration, this essay suggests that we are now experiencing a general condition of the de-authorization of information—what Trump calls “fake news—in which the legitimacy of every form of knowledge is rendered questionable. The health crisis, Joselit argues, is equally a crisis of the authorization of information gone viral. This situation heightens a contradiction within the history and criticism of modern and contemporary art, which, on the one hand, has typically valued avant-garde practices for their capacity to challenge authority, and on the other hand, has taken postmodern calls to de-authorize canons to heart. The essay concludes with a call for critics and art historians to risk authorizing new historical narratives, just as artists, since at least the moment of Pop art, have appropriated viral images in order to furnish them with new authors—to author-ize new meanings.

In a brief excerpt from his book Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT, Spring 2020), David Joselit discusses how global contemporary art reanimates the past as a resource for the present, combating modern art's legacy of Eurocentrism.

A brief remembrance of Douglas Crimp's political activism and its transformational effect on the author.

In this short polemical text, Joselit argues against naturalizing reliance on private philanthropy for public art institutions. He suggests a variety of ways such institutions can reinvigorate their public responsibility, including making cultural resources available to all citizens for free.

A wide-ranging and definitive interview with conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll, who is best known for works that transpose land art to urban contexts and to questions of public policy such as zoning and access to free Internet service. Carroll describes her practice in terms of “making architecture perform,” which she does through direct interventions in city streets, such as her rotation of a suburban house in prototype 180 (1999–ongoing) so that it's back façade was turned to the street, while it's front faced a public park at the back of the lot, or in Public Utility 2.0 (2015), which sought to provide broadband wireless through unused radio frequencies, otherwise known as Super Wi-Fi, to underserved communities, largely of color, in New Orleans. Carroll is a leading voice at the intersection of urban theory, public policy, and media art, and in this interview, she articulates the several complex layers of her most significant projects to date.

Artist Lucy Raven speaks with David Joselit about her multidisciplinary practice and contemporary notions of image-making and viewing. Reflecting on the production and circulation of both analog and digital images—how they function, where they come from, and how they get distributed—Raven's animated films aim to denaturalize the process of viewing and draw attention to the ways in which films are inextricably bound up in complex systems of global commerce and finance.

Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson speak with several October editors about afrotropes, recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity. Copeland and Thompson argue that ultimately such forms are transformed and deformed in response to the specific social, political, and institutional conditions that inform the experiences of black people as well as changing perceptions of blackness.

David Joselit argues that although the politicization of information and fake news is nothing new—facts, after all, have always been ratified by power, and standards of evidence are historically specific—the mode of its authentication is now in crisis. He describes this condition as a state of cognitive conflict in which different species of knowledge battle one another for pre-eminence, rather than reach for an agonistic but productive political translation or negotiation. Adopting the concept of cognitive justice as theorized by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Joselit proposes that under Trumpism art can be a resource for working out a politicized and materialized, even formal, theory of information. By tracking the plasticity of information—the shapes it assumes through circulation, shifts in scale and saturation, and its velocities and frictions—which is deeply enmeshed in relations of power, post-Conceptual art can have real purchase on cognitive justice.

As in neoliberal market theory, where maximal information is said to make markets more efficient, what Joselit calls “Conceptual art of the press release” (in which the artwork is “translated” into text as a proposition about its meaning) makes even difficult art easy to consume. The once radical proposal of Conceptual art—that objects exist in a transactional relation with text (and prosaic photographic documents)—has now become business as usual. But this is not merely the result of the now-standard practice of training artists in MFA programs, where learning consists of verbally justifying one's artworks before a cohort of peers and artist-instructors, nor the demands of a global and increasingly virtual art market. It is also a condition of today's academic practice in which art history is little more than the weaving together of primary and secondary sources that “historicize” and “theorize” objects without attending to them specifically. The current challenge for artists and critics is not to forego engaging with information, but rather to resist the allure of its transparency in favor of tracking its plasticity—in other words, the shapes of social governance and aesthetic speculation that its myriad overlapping channels assume.

The term contemporary has shifted from an adjective to a noun. Once a neutral descriptor meant to indicate recentness, the contemporary is now widely claimed as a period, composed of loosely related aesthetic tendencies, following and displacing modernism. In this regard, it enters a tradition of now discredited movements that includes “pluralism” and “postmodernism.” Unlike these predecessors, however, which took Euro-Amer ican art as their pr imary archive, contemporary encompasses the temporally coeval but geographically diverse expressions of a global art world—a point critics often emphasize by noting that the literal meaning of con-temporary is “with time,” which in turn is sometimes poetically glossed as referring to “comrades in time.” A framework for global art is thus furnished through the undeniable and ostensibly value-free contention that work so designated occupies the same moment in time. There is, however, a paradox in rendering the adjective contemporary as a noun: When packaged as a period, the contemporary unconsciously reinscribes a model of temporal progression that was fundamental to modernism. While discussions of the contemporary typically emphasize its synchronic dimension—calling upon, as I've mentioned, the con to suggest simultaneity across different locations and perspectives—by definition it is always advancing. Like an avant-garde, the contemporary can only go forward, but unlike an avant-garde, the contemporary doesn't have an avant: Its forward movement does not carry the productive shock of being in advance or, perhaps more appropriate, of being out of sync with its time. In its discursive structure, the contemporary is a kind of blank or denatured modernism, one that is only ever “with” its moment. And this seemingly innocuous “with” masks the dramatically uneven development of globalization. For being together in time does nothing to redress economic disparity, as the victims of collapsed Bangladeshi garment factories producing inexpensive clothes for Western corporations can attest.