Thus, for example, Trevor Paglen sees art as a “safe house” in a world given over to digital surveillance, while Claire Fontaine imagines it as a “human strike” against all scripted identities.

Such is the opportunity in the current crisis: to transform disruptive emergency into structural change. Today most of us look out on a world that has moved, technologically and politically, beyond our control, and this extreme situation has prompted extreme formulations by artists and critics alike. There is a technological concern, too, which traces recent transformations in media, in particular the advent of “machine vision” (images produced by machines for other machines), “operational images” (images that intervene in the world rather than represent it), and the algorithmic profiling of people as data points. But how are artists, writers, and others to respond when law becomes highly erratic, arbitrarily enforced one moment and just as arbitrarily absent the next? How to create, how to survive, in a state of emergency? Historically, the avant-garde aimed to contest the oppressive presence of law, whether that law was understood as artistic, social, political, or all three at once.

The virus has just made this all the more blatant. Since 9/11, in the US and elsewhere, we have lived in a world where the rule of law is sometimes suspended and often spotty, in ways that have put countless people at varying degrees of risk. The current state of emergency didn’t begin in March 2020 it runs back to September 2001. I do have a few thoughts, though, on what has happened lately that’s the subject of my book What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism as a Time of Debacle. So please don’t ask me what lies ahead for the art world if and when Covid-19 loosens its grip. I could list other failed forecasts, but maybe these are enough to suggest why even I don’t listen to me anymore. Surely the Occupy movement would prompt museum directors to rethink excessive reliance on plutocratic patrons. Surely with the financial meltdown in 2008 the art market would crash and the art world would be transformed.

What Comes After Farce by Hal Foster