on reviews of New Humans: Memories of the Future (New Museum, March 21–August 2026, New York) and I Am Tony (New Museum, September 25, 2026–January 4, 2027)
Two recent reviews of successive shows held at the New Museum once again demonstrated how much of an ally this venue is to video and media art. They also brought up expressions such as “late to the party,” “better late than never,” and “d’où parles-tu?“
The first, published on Brooklyn Rail, looks at a group show that includes works by Hito Steyerl, Camille Henrot, Lucy Beech, and Alice Wang. The other, from Hyperallergic, offers commentary on a survey of Arthur Jafa’s practice. These are not sites I usually turn to for reviews or essays on the work of such artists. But since both have contributors on hand, rather than correspondents, and can offer commentary in real time (unlike what I’m doing here), these two reviews shaped my first impressions of the shows.
Stephanie Wambugu’s text on Jafa belongs to a genre of deeper review that doesn’t quite fit Hyperallergic’s usual pitch for singularity — which is not to say readers of other art publications would fault it for that. It avoids jargon and takes care to describe the work. It is forthcoming in its reception while trying to make a case for it. Yet questions of meaning remain. She writes that “the show is densely packed with work that ventures beyond the video art that has made Jafa one of America’s most important living artists,” and that, as the largest exhibition of his work to date, “its ambitions — which it achieves with mixed results — seem to be to engage in the same themes Jafa has continually mined, this time in even more idiosyncratic and brash ways.“
Does venturing outside video art lead to mixed results? Is Jafa a video artist?
What is outside of video? The photograph Rwanda 1999, actually taken by Jafa, may or may not critique the way victims of barbarism are recognized only once historical and scholarly consensus, and time, have sanctioned that commemoration. It dwells in ambiguity, raising sensitive questions without going so far as to answer them. BIG Wheel VI (2026), described as a massive tire wrapped in chains, is imbued with loaded meanings that end up asking a lot of a tire. By then, fatigue sets in after two floors, and it’s hard to overstate how physically dark much of the exhibition is.
The text closes with Wambugu’s reflection on the survey’s title — a reference to jazz drummer and one-time Miles Davis Quintet member Tony Williams — acknowledging it as “a charming, playful, and rich homage,” but asking whether anyone actually gets it. What does it mean if I say that I got it? What I don’t get is how the invitation the work extends — to engage conceptually across so many fields: Black music, religion and secularity, American cinema, political violence, popular culture, the internet — goes largely untaken. Or does the review risk not being published on that site at all if it did take it up? As mentioned above: I’m late to the party.
The New Humans: Memories of the Future review is all about questions, starting with its opening lines: “Video art has a bad rep. In contemporary art terms, video art is hard to define, its boundaries too shifty and aesthetic merits ambiguous. At its worst, video is low-brow, lacking in production value, emotional force, and narrative depth.” Wasn’t there an editor, or a colleague, to correct or challenge any of this?
A lingering incredulity hovers after lines like these — a kind of “what if”: is it because video has such a bad rep that there are only four media-art works in the show at all? Of these, only Alice Wang’s is redeemed; the others are described generically, each closed out with a single piece of critical insight: “Lucie Beech’s Out of Body invites us to consider the equalizing factor of waste matter and the enormous efforts humans in modern times have made to mask this basic truth/ Hito Steyerl’s Mechanical Kurds dismantles the geospatial separation of museum and refugee camp, New York and Erbil, reinforcing the scale of dehumanization that affects and connects all of humanity/ Camille Henrot’s film In the Veins turns to another domain too often excluded from futurist discourse: care — a reminder that, for essayistic videos, the difference between profundity and wallpaper often comes down to the room you give it to breathe/ Alice Wang’s The Sky Is Not Realoffers the most introspective video of the show, in which the artist’s unaffected yet decidedly intimate voice-over drifts between astronomical phenomena, earthly life, and personal memory.”
The incredulity lingers through the closing lines too: “Far from the ambient, semi-ignored video art that flickers at the edges of many exhibitions, these works insist on duration, attention, and vulnerability.”
To be fair, New York remains one of the strategic sites where art is seen and sold, far less made — which ought to demand a sharper critical gaze than this. It offered a picture of what has happened to art criticism in that city. It had been some time since I’d opened Artforum, Art in America, and the like, unless something was quoted in an “international” essay or review I happened to be reading — d’où parles-tu? So: better late than never? I still wanted to see those shows.
— Stephanie Wambugu, “Arthur Jafa, King of Pop,” Hyperallergic, September 25, 2026
— Kathy Ou, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” Brooklyn Rail, 2026
