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?

This essay serves as an introduction to the Questionnaire on Art and Machine Learning. It opens with the testimony of Sam Altman before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Privacy, Technology and the Law in May 2023, following the launch of ChatGPT a year earlier. ChatGPT is part of a wave of generative AI: AI that not only classifies or analyzes information but also generates it. Media responses to ChatGPT and a range of other text-to-image and text-to-video generators—including Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, Deep AI, and Sora—tend to divide between “Boosterism” and “Doomerism”: They either echo Silicon Valley's habitual refrain about the inherent goodness of technological innovation or they describe dystopian scenarios in which human agency is all but eclipsed. “Generative and Adversarial: Art and the Prospects of AI” argues that artists, art historians, critics, and curators offer far more nuanced perspectives on the prospects of AI. Borrowing the language of “generative adversarial networks”—one of several machine-learning models that have revolutionized image production in the past decade—it interrogates AI's aesthetic, political, and ethical possibilities, as well as its historical genealogies.

Earlier this year, October distributed a questionnaire about art and machine learning to a select group of artists, art historians, critics, and curators, posing the following questions: “If AI algorithms have the capacity to analyze massive datasets and identify patterns, how has this capability influenced the generation of new artistic concepts and ideas? How are artists collaborating with, changing, torquing, or critiquing AI systems? Compared to, say, the history of photography and chance, or art and systems, does artists' use of generative AI today represent a difference in degree or kind? How have artists probed the creative possibilities of generative AI? How have they condemned the biases, ecological impact, and military-industrial origins of AI? Developed their own hybrid models and architectures? Explored the instrumentalization of AI systems, or, on the other hand, their unpredictability? What other models are possible? What is no longer possible? What is human or machine, creativity or computation, in the first place?” Responses were provided by K Allado-McDowell, American Artist, Nancy Baker-Cahill, Ian Cheng, Kate Crawford, Stephanie Dinkins, Simon Denny, Michele Elam, Noam Elcott, Alex Galloway, Holly Herndon and Matt Dryer, Tishan Hsu, David Joselit, Alexander Kluge, Lev Manovich, Trevor Paglen, Christiane Paul, Kris Paulsen, Warren Sack and Jennifer Gonzalez, Edward Shanken, Antonio Somaini, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Fred Turner, and Amelia Winger-Bearskin.

This wide-ranging conversation with Black cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman—occasioned by the twenty-fifth anniversary of her groundbreaking first book, Scenes of Subjection , to be republished this year in an edition by Norton—explores the author's shifting approaches to the visual over time, the limitations and potentialities of the archive for its discontents, and the models she has both turned to and herself invented—most notably the concept of “critical fabulation”—in the ongoing attempt to find ethical modes of engaging African/Diasporic life, thought, and form in an anti-Black world.

This introduction to the special thematic cluster on burnout describes how the notion has informed cultures of contemporary work during the pandemic and the ways in which the concept of burnout reproduces the intertwined interests of labor and self-management under conditions of neoliberalism. The essay sketches a brief genealogy of the term, starting with the formulation of neurasthenia that preceded it and proceeding to its first citation within medical literature by Herbert J. Freudenberger and then to its philosophical uptake in the writing of Byung-Chul Han. In addressing burnout's relationship to recent art, criticism, and histories of media, the introduction stresses its unequal impacts across disparate populations relative to class, race, and gender.

This open letter responds to the murders of six women of Asian descent on March 16, 2021, all workers in Atlanta-area massage parlors. It describes both the contemporary climate and the historical foundations for anti-Asian/AAPI racism in the country, and it reflects on both the promise and the violence that inheres in acts of naming and nomination for Asian women. In its address to “Asian sisters,” the letter challenges the terms of Asian American representation and considers larger discussions among BIPOC scholars about whether to refuse institutional recognition by the state.

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.

This article considers the prospects of “facial politics” in the wake of CoVID-19. Recounted through the author's positionality as an Asian American feminist academic, the article describes her encounters in the university and the street, in the United States and China. Addressing gestures of face touching and the trope of the mask relative to its wearer, the essay draws on the work of Mel Y. Chen on the viral conjunction of race, animality, illness, and gender as inflected further by both historical and contemporary treatments of “Chineseness” and visibility. In so doing, the article reframes concepts of perfomativity and the face that are associated with Judith Butler, with the face becoming “the fallen site of discourse” under the conditions of a pandemic.

A brief remembrance of Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), “the most influential curator of the past quarter-century.”

Let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cunning. —Félix Fénéon, as paraphrased by Bridget Riley