Art in America’s Fall Issue Features Five “Icons,” a Theory of Cringe, and More

Critic Bob Nickas, in a recent essay on the musician Steven Stapleton, took the temperature of contemporary art and found it tepid. “Increasingly, since the pandemic and the rightward (wrongward) tilt in global politics,” he wrote, “we have witnessed an unfortunate shift in art—from works with more seriousness of purpose to works of palliative escapism, art in which there is scant danger of disturbance.” Those words came back to me as this issue was going to press.