‘New Humans’ and the Strange End of Contemporary Art as We Know It

Ben Davis | artnet news | 19th March 2026

The New Museum’s post-renovation show frames our current moment as one of “existential questioning”. Are we being replaced by algorithms or robots? Will our future be better with yet more technology or perhaps less? Many writers wonder what forms the new art will take but this sort of questioning surely isn’t new. It’s exactly what modernism was about. This writer offers up his description of the new art to come – “works that uniquely activate your sense of being a body in physical space with others”.