WHAT WE’RE READING - The New Museum Returns, but Humans Are Left Behind
Harold Phillips | Published on 4/12/2026
"The New Museum knows that most viewers will be of two minds about “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” a blockbuster exhibition meant to crown the museum’s reopening after a sixty-thousand-square-foot expansion. With more than seven hundred objects, spread across three floors, the show is designed to both stimulate and fatigue you. The official remit is 'what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes.' In practice, this means a madhouse of multimedia rooms, packed with gurgling videos and useless machines and humanoid bodies. There are bodies made from scrap metal, bodies pierced with tentacles and affixed with screens for nipples and eyes, bodies broken down for parts, and walls lined with images of skin. In some rooms, paintings are hung salon style. In others, objects are suspended from the ceiling, mounted above doorways, or made to float via balloon. As if to poke fun at the show’s size and ambition, the curators have installed in the lobby a visual joke by the artist Ryan Gander: a tiny animatronic mouse.
"Still, if we’re looking for 'what it means to be human' today, the exhibition isn’t a bad place to start..."
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