Art, which had previously been a way to produce discursive polyphony, aligned itself with the dominant social-justice discourses of the day, with works dressed up as protest and contextualized according to decolonial or queer theory, driven by a singular focus on identity.

1957 brought the most political international postwar art movement of them all: Situationism, which railed against personality-based individualism and asserted that art is determined by real-world conditions and situations. Artists today still work from that premise.

But in general, the story was one of rigid progression that looked, on the museum walls, almost inevitable. Which is exactly as the museum intended: An institution that came of age at the imperial height of the American Century, funded during the Cold War in part with CIA money meant to exalt and export a showcase of free expression (sometimes... See more