The New Museum is almost as old as MoMA was in 1977, when the New Museum was founded. Its current, permanent home on the Bowery is much more recent (2007) and the New Museum Triennial, which began with 2009’s tribute to youthful narcissism, “Younger Than Jesus,” is the newest of all. But the Museum, over a decade older than Jesus, is undeniably middle-aged. In this fifth triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone,” curated by Margot Norton and Jamillah James, it seems embarrassed to have realized it’s run out of material and did its best to throw something together. The title, sourced from a Brazilian proverb, conjures exceedingly modest aspirations to the extremely gradual but also evokes the fear that is also a wish for a world flooded by rising tides and relieved, finally, of its own existence. It is full of work convinced that the world as we know it is doddering towards its end (a common hysteria endemic to the highly educated and underemployed) but gives little consideration to the possibility that it is this old New Museum and old new media art, not the world around it, that has run its course.

The show is crowded, but not without its triumphs. Iris Touliatou’s Untitled (Still not over you) is a showstopper that ought to have been given a wider berth: barely glowing, sputtering fluorescents form two massive squares towering over the gallery, their hollow centers transforming the white walls into terrifying, dominating emptiness. These are not the bright, friendly columns of light we find in Flavin, rather they’re dim and busted up, recovered from the ceiling of a condemned office building in Athens. The humming half light of the old bulbs holds in suspension the moment of their death, not letting them pass away into junkyard flotsam, but not powerful enough to let them live, either. It conjures up the double negative of the gaps in contemporary life — the needs unmet and unnamed — and contemporary art’s refusal, disinterest, or inability to trace their contours. Touliatou’s work casts the poverty of so many of the others, of this exhibition, of this institution that behaves increasingly like a 45-year-old who still shows up to frat parties, of this fumbling century, into inescapable relief.

At the New Museum a decade ago, I waited in line for two hours, outside, in January, to see Carsten Höller’s “Experience”, the primary draw of which was the two-story slide bored through one of the cement floors. My companion and I were disappointed to learn that to “participate” in the slide we’d have to wait another two hours and sign a waiver. So, after half an hour taking in the other “experiences,” we walked over to Tropical on Elizabeth Street and drank something fruity and full of Blue 2, which was, in every way, stranger and more delightful than such thrilling activities as smelling faint perfume and swallowing empty gel cap pills trussed up in the language of late 20th century deconstruction. After this, every time I find myself disappointed at the New Museum, it is my own damn fault.

“I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed anything there,” an artist friend tells me. Another digs all the way back to 2008 to come up with something resembling pleasure. I can think of a couple: Carol Rama and, emphatically, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The Nari Ward show was good in an academic sense, but I wouldn’t use the word “enjoy,” which is fine. “Enjoy” is probably not the desired effect there. I can think of many more instances, like the Höller, or 2016’s “The Keeper,” that left me somewhere between mildly and acutely annoyed, wondering if this museum’s aspirations to “publics” ever once materialized in anything resembling something genuinely pleasurable for any public beyond its own devoted milieu? 

The New Museum cannot hold its audience in the thrall of sub-nouveauté forever, not even for much longer. There has to be something compelling about the art they put on the walls and through the floor, ideally arrived at with minimal pseudo-intellectual backflips. This, unfortunately, is an Olympic gymnastics display. Nearly every work in “Soft Water Hard Stone” is accompanied by wall texts that are postmodern deconstructions of legibility that push the limits of credulity, a particular problem given the unfamiliarity of American audiences with many of the international artists included.

This crowding of texts and objects threatens to drown another moment of real quality in the noise: Ambera Wellmann’s epic-scaled painting Strobe belongs to the tendency I’m calling neo-surrealism, which recognizes both the poverty of the present and the impossibility of art, and impossibility it mourns rather than celebrates. Wellmann accomplishes this in a drunken mélange of scenes and figures that refuse to coalesce. A group of miniature girls smokes cigarettes; gargantuan fleshy forms fall just short of forming figures; a green leaf shoots up from an asshole in a twee play on Hieronymous Bosch. Medieval monks, bored of their copying duties, were known to insert bizarre figures and scenes in the margins of their codices, and here that sort of playful but defeated marginalia has banished scripture and achieved its conquest of the page. It’s a very good painting, which opens itself up to the pleasure of the exploring eye. It seems to be aware that it cannot offer anything more than its referents, and submits to this fact humbly. It knows where its limits lie.

On my visit there were a number of 20-year-old art students scrawling notes in their Moleskines, not about the work, and certainly not drawing the work, but from the absurd texts posted next to each work. They’ll go back to the dorm, pop an Adderall and contort their young minds into grasping the profundity of epistemological systems and polyphonic histories while moving in a galaxy brain moment from the dull banality of knowledge to the sparkly world of “knowledges”. I’d worry about these young peoples’ futures, but they seem already to have willingly enlisted in the jargoneering bootcamp leading to low-paid commissions from e-flux.

It’s remarkable how much decentering and decolonial impulses rest on the most obscure and insular of European theories. It betrays a tendency more about self-loathing than a broadening embrace, a narcissism only strengthened by its inversion. The breadth of the triennial’s international scope is less a testament to global diversity than to the successful conquest of western postmodernism, or, at the very least, its aptitude for folding all of space and time, every human nuance and texture, into its own flattened out logic. We are led to believe that artists the world over are keen to reproduce the most masturbatory and disposable symptoms of the greater European art school. South Africa’s Bronwyn Katz “investigates relationships between form, memory and language” (yawn). Sandra Mujinga, hailing from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, “considers visibility in a social context, specifically the lived experience of Blackness,” a phrase that appears not just in this show but across the field as a disturbingly generic descriptor of work by any African artist or artist of African descent, as if all these diverse humans and artworks are reducible to “the lived experience of Blackness.”

I wonder sometimes if, prior to the emergence of institutional “critique” at the end of the ‘60s, the way museums were funded was as shrouded in mystery as the claims that that art “unveiled” or “exposed” something or another imply. I doubt it. But at least then there was something inventive at work, a feeling that somewhat resembled genuine rebellion and a vague sense of possibility. It may once have been possible to assert that institutional critique contained the potentially productive contradiction of artworks that attack the museum, the institution that makes their spectral existence possible. There is hostility in Haacke or Fraser: the type of anger a child directs toward the parent who disciplines him but on whom he grudgingly relies. They bit the hand that fed, and produced a degree of genuine unease not dissimilar to secondhand embarrassment. 

Institutional critique embraces the imagination of a wish to change the world while, in practice, it remains fully content transcribing it. This time the poor sap tasked with replicating a sufficiently “now” image of critique is Clara Ianni. Labor Drawing (New Museum) charts in abstract lines the commutes of museum workers identified by their titles and reports on  work-from-home status. It’s cute, coming from an institution that has — not at all uniquely — invested a great deal in union busting. But it sure is fun to reflect on the heroic security guards who commuted daily for the past 20 months while the info laborers crafted all this brilliant wall text from home.

“Critique,” however hollow, is now de rigueur for any “progressive” exhibition and becomes more boring and predictable with each turn. Like Forensic Architecture’s chaste criticism of Whitney Board member Warren Kanders in the latest Biennial, works of this type now toothlessly slobber on institutions with flagging (if over-performed) conviction and with full, enthusiastic participation of museum leadership.

My gripe with Labor Drawing is not its contradictory relationship with the institution or its practical impotence. There will always be contradictions between works of art — which at their best stumble toward human freedom — and stultified bourgeois society. The resolution to this — if there even is an example of this anywhere in art history — is emphatically not dissolving art into action. And I can only fault it so much for operating in a mode of art-making that has long ago lost its virility, and so fails to comprehend its own social character. The fact that it renders human suffering in chilly conceptualism is irksome, but that’s all art for the past 50 years. My problem with this work, this show, with nearly every show I recall seeing at this museum, is the pretense of radicalism in which endless virtuosic variations on just a handful of banal modes  is aggrandized in self-serious language games. The occasional work of real quality is masked by its status as a conceptual puzzle. 

That the New Museum retains not only its name but its pretense to avant-garde character is co-symptomatic with the tendency in art history departments to teach the art of the decade in which it was founded — the 1970s — as contemporary. It was created in the afterglow of the museum protests of the 1960s when the consensus emerged that art would be better off outside of those stodgy institutions and in new institutions like the New Museum, P.S.1 (MoMA PS1 since 2010), The Kitchen and others. If it still appears as the vanguard of anything, it is because nothing has since emerged to take up the mantle. This infantile embrace of stagnation is why The New Old Museum, an established institution, is depressing.

The necessary eclecticism demanded of this and every established museum winds up feeling repetitive and blurred together rather than unique and surprising. Modernism, endowed with the destructive impulse of the bourgeoisie to smash all that was old, had held destruction and tradition, the new and the old, in a tense and gripping balance. But the smash-smash impulse of the 20th century dissolved that tension. The new is good, the old is #problematic, but there seems to be nothing actually new to say. Neo-conceptual virtuosity emerges, just as the advent of virtuosity has always expressed the end of a particular style or movement. 

A bizarre amount of works in this show are explained as mediations or intersections or investigations of “bodies” in “built environments,“ which means absolutely nothing other than a symptomatic expression of a species so despairing in ourselves that we’d rather be meat puppets than humans, fleshy blobs subordinate to dead nature. I like the Krista Clark arrangements of fiberglass, cement and plywood, but I’ve seen nearly identical works so many times before, using the same conceptual trick that swaps out artifice for something more literal or believes it can be more honest by turning buildings inside out. If this is a show of emerging artists, then what is emerging is just more of the same old jokes from ten years ago, which were the same jokes from ten years before, and so on and so on. Perhaps the “built environments” references merely indicate the grip of postmodernism, the foundations of which were in architecture, not art and after which art is still compelled to tail.

Not even my complaints are original. This is second-hand art and thrift store criticism. It has been 30 years since the late Dave Hickey griped about the gripers who condemn “any work of art that does not contain raw plywood” as a torrid commodity pushed on a corrupt market. The raw plywood art that Hickey is discussing was the product of a particular academic anti-capitalism in decline that cast beauty as bourgeois decadence and the commerce of art as intolerable pollution of a purer, less varnished, more penetrating art. The fatal error in reasoning is already made in the assumption that any formulation of modern art exists before or outside of market forces, and doubles down in its preference for thoroughly institutional art, which it imagines is independent of the nefarious market. The ghost of 1970s institutional critique is thus joined with 1990s institutional fawning: the types of artworks that are only possible to imagine as artworks in the very institutions art had spent the past two decades snarling at. 

What emerges in this situation is not art for the eye and pleasure of the mind, but for the administration of the spirit. The show appears cacophonous and messy because it is not interested in pleasing the eye. It is rather an exercise in institutional penetration through various floors and ceilings in which the cohesion of its vaguely anti- politics and its audience — i.e., contemporary art students — are recalibrated and affirmed. It was possible in the 1930s for Greenberg to distinguish kitsch, which affirms reality from the avant-garde, which gropes at its edges and gaps. But boundary pushing — performed against empty air by deluded mimes — is now itself a mode of kitsch, which has embraced a permanent state of resistance that is an end in itself. The status quo is fighting the status quo. The same blah material is trotted out in tatters season after season for slight rearrangement. 

The result is, graciously, less bash-you-over-the-head propagandistic than much of what became synonymous with “radical” art around 2015. Now that Trump is no longer president, no one really cares, or they’re semi-consciously aware that raging against the machine at this point would mean raging against the Democrats, which is verboten. So we’re no longer in the business of revolution. “Soft Water Hard Stone” evokes the millenia-long processes that carve canyons and displace any desire for a different world into a nearly unthinkable future. All it can do is gripe about the present in the vaguest of terms. It succeeds only when that gripe is elevated to a scream and real despair takes form, the kind that can’t wait another century, even another day, for relief. It succeeds in its unhappiness.

Henry Gould Harvey IV presents a worthwhile altar that breaks the mundanity of found object conceptualism with nostalgic pewter characters, dripping wax and mystical diagrams. It’s not the affirmative mysticism of a magic that will eventually wear down stone, but a dejected longing, a religion of last resort necessity. Alex Ayed sticks a beehive in a corner, Brandon Ndife speeds the clock of an abandoned home, growing trees out of cabinets and chairs, returning to dirt. Tomás Diaz Cadeño hangs cement stalactites over a crumbling patio and runs water down their surfaces, dripping into dissolution. The modern discontent that drove a desire for transformation became a joke in the cynical last years of the 20th century, but it seems no longer capable of laughing at itself. This is the suicidal art of a world drained of its will to live. 

Where it succeeds as an exhibition is in capturing the eschatological conviction that we are living in the end times in which the cult enthusiasm for the coming of heaven on earth is replaced by a secular shame that humanity ever existed. Utopia is decay. The path of deconstruction, having smashed up the moderns, does not eat itself or transform itself, it just scatters every thought and wish to the wind, then reassembles them anew each day. It’s held up by duct tape and a wish, always in the process of falling apart, propped up by ever more ridiculous theorizing by which it casts a spell of its own importance. Of course this situation drives towards suicide, of course art wills its own unexistence. 

If this particular genre of academicism believes that the only truly critical art is always art about itself, and finds it has run out of self to critique, it of course will conclude that history itself has come to a close rather than consider the possibility that it is only this vein of concept-driven new (old) media art, with its own relatively stunted genealogy, that is due to pass from the world, which will have little trouble continuing without it.