Beginning about a decade ago on the social network formerly known as Twitter, anonymous accounts began cropping up posting out-of-context screen grabs from popular television shows.

Feeds dedicated to the most-watched programmes, like The Sopranos and The Simpsons, attracted followers in the hundreds of thousands, and before long, almost every T.V. series had its own viral no-context Twitter account. The Guardian expressly singled out @oocsopranos as “a shibboleth of sorts,” an inside joke for the initiated.

Part of the thrill of these feeds was the simultaneous randomness and hyper-specificity of orphan images that would every now and then coincide with concurrent events or appear to shed new light upon some aspect of pop culture.

Another pleasure was their ability to resuscitate, recirculate, and remediate one form into another, in this case transplanting conventional television into the online realm and generating an exhilaration around the juxtapositional currency of it all.

The Harvard University professor Homi K. Bhabha might have identified in no-context Twitter feeds “the process of reinscription and negotiation,” where surplus meaning is produced in the time-lag between the originary text and its variant reiteration. But in 1994, when Bhabha was writing his seminal tome, The Location of Culture, Twitter did not yet exist, and it would take until just now to place these disparate notions, like a Ringgold alongside a Picasso, side by side.

I couldn’t help but think of out-of-context Twitter accounts as Bhabha and The Museum of Modern Art’s director emeritus Glenn D. Lowry engaged in conversation last Wednesday at la Grande Bibliothèque for the most recent Art Speaks event. Specifically, I couldn’t help but recall the thin sliver of time during which presenting no-context content seemed radical and new — those halcyon days between Twitter as a space for niche memes and the completion of its transformation into a river of fundament.

If Lowry and Bhabha’s discussion was any indication of the museum’s imminent trajectory, we are currently witnessing the art institution’s analogous swirling into the sewers of mass culture. It was less worrisome that this talk advanced no new ideas than that even the old ideas were defanged.

Like a number of attendees, the superficiality and lack of spontaneity in Bhabha and Lowry’s dialogue disappointed me. I was furthermore disappointed by the self-congratulatory mansplaining to questions from some very smart women around how to make contemporary art engaging to young people, A.I.’s propensity to misinform, and the MMFA’s chief curator Mary-Dailey Desmarais’s inquiry about the museum’s pedagogical responsibility.

But what was most disappointing was the insistence that destabilization is the most productive way for museums to meet this present moment of profound and cascading crises. Amongst the game of Buzzword Bingo that this pair played onstage — Immersion! Activation! Agency! — the notion of deliberately destabilizing historicity came off at best as antiquated, and at worst, reckless.

Wednesday’s discussion opens with MoMA founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s diagrammatic metaphor of the museum acting as a “torpedo moving through time,” going on to challenge the linearity of art history’s course and suggesting instead a rhizomatic organizational structure.

Bhabha and Lowry apparently borrowed the rhizome concept from Deleuze and Guattari who wrote in A Thousand Plateaus about the opposition between the One and the multiple: languages, territories, histories. “At the level of theory,” Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the status of multiplicities is correlative to that of spaces” — presumably, in this instance, the museum space.

Lowry proposes drawing new lines through this archival space in order to encourage new points of accumulation, stoppage, and resonance. The idea is that dislocating artworks from narrow historical or generic lines will trace heterogeneous lines that tease out new connections and possibilities for making meaning.

Lowry invokes the example of hanging a Picasso next to a Faith Rinngold painting, contrasting their respective movements, epochs, and subjectivities, and antagonizing the audience to draw new lines of flight. In these unforeseen lines, Lowry believes, is radical potential.

One of the problems with rhizomatic structure is that it also characterizes the virus, the operative mode for the mass circulation of disorder. Releasing ideas from their traditional ecosystems opens up the theoretical space that Fredric Jameson described as the logic of postmodern historiography — “a cultural genre thus generically separated from the other one called historical knowledge.”

The “interesting dissonance” and “garish magic realism” of unexpected juxtapositions, according to Jameson, produces a “bonus of pleasure to be consumed.” This is not radical; this is capital, limiting rather than liberating, restraining instead of redeeming.

Deleuze and Guattari warn, too, that each kind of line has its dangers. “The lines of flight,” they caution, “always risk abandoning their creative potentialities…being turned into a line of destruction pure and simple (fascism).”

As a Canadian of Ukrainian descent, I am constantly reminded in this time of crisis of the cultural annihilation policy that Russia and other violent global powers are bureaucratically enacting in order to rewrite history. Destroying Ukrainian art and iconography, blowing up religious edifices, razing entire swaths of cultural memory — these are destructive strategies, not theoretical abstractions. They are really happening. The Ukrainian people right now would do anything for a sense of cultural stability.

The past is another country. Thus, we must be aware that removing works of art from their chronological context is the equivalent of redrawing maps, dislocating culture, and gerrymandering history.

So, forgive me if destabilizing historicity in an American art museum appears a bit out of step with what international institutions might be doing to face this moment of crisis. Forgive me for saying that I appreciate organization, admire order, respect historical knowledge. On the frontlines, clear communication and accurate timing may win both small battles and wider wars.

Ultimately, Lowry and Bhabha’s conversation confirmed that contemporary art has been entirely subsumed into systems of value, which Jameson hinted at as the “bonus of pleasure.” Jameson’s acolyte, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, wrote presciently in 2004: “… the frontier zones of hypercapital do not try to repress so much as absorb the irrational and the illogical.”

Inside capitalism’s infinite confines, there is no such thing as spontaneous surplus value. Every risk is managed, every shock is measurable, every juxtaposition rendered predictable. In the lingo of out-of-context Sopranos: “Every last fucking coffee bean is in the computer and has to be accounted for.”

If time is money, as the old axiom goes, then the time-lag between sign and meaning, utterance and interpretation, is where (or, more accurately, when) excess value emerges. Its harvesting, however, is instantaneous. Therefore, the juxtaposition of Pablo Picasso against Faith Ringgold is less about activating meaning between these two diverse artists than it is about prolonging and monetizing the act of activation. Escape is impossible, not even through the gift shop.

As soon as a system starts benefiting those who protest it, the system ceases to be a structure worth protesting. Since participation time is more valuable than resistance time. Because of this, contemporary art has ceased to advance radical political ideas unless those ideas can be commodified. Even Banksy’s quixotic street art is bought and sold — and curated.

And so, radical order-making has become the avant-garde artform par excellence to oppose instability. The logical counterweight to productivity is non-productivity, just as non-violence is the antithesis of violence.

Curating contemporary art that is impossible to monetize is one radical tactic. Think of Marc-Olivier Hamelin’s recent exhibition at Centre Clark entitled Both of us were dreamers, young love in the sun, or the LODE collective’s show La naissance de l’art currently on at Galerie Eli Kerr. These assemblages of banal and unmarketable objects anticipate their designation and cultivate new configurations of accumulation, stoppage, and resonance.

I was heartened to read a few thoughtful critiques of Lowry and Bhabha’s conversation online, notably one that Le Devoir’s art critic Nicolas Mavrikakis had written. In it, Mavrikakis says:

On aurait pu aussi évoquer le retour en force de la censure (à droite comme à gauche), ainsi que celui de l’autocensure. On aurait pu discuter de la soumission de nos institutions à l’argent et au vedettariat de pacotille, à l’argent de la mode et du commerce parfois sale, à la logique des marques et du spectacle. On peut également évoquer la consommation des artistes par le milieu des arts, qui les jette dès qu’ils ne sont plus assez rentables; l’instrumentalisation de l’art.

We could also have invoked the resurgence of censorship (on both the right and the left), as well as the rise of self-censorship. We could have discussed our institutions’ subservience to money and vulgar celebrity, to the money of fashion and sometimes shady commerce, to the logic of brands and of spectacle. We could also have mentioned the art world’s exploitation of artists, discarding them as soon as they are no longer profitable enough. The instrumentalization of art.

I couldn’t agree more that these pressing topics were conspicuously absent from Bhabha and Lowry’s conversation. If the no-context approach is intended to provide an early clue to the MAC’s new direction, I fear that this institution, as well as all museums of its ilk, are in real trouble.

However, at the very bottom of Mavrikakis’s comment, which a friend sent me on Instagram, was a delicious out-of-context juxtaposition. The collapsable bubble prompts us to click on “Voir moins.”

This, I believe, is paramount and the most poignant advice to impart upon younger generations first encountering contemporary art — or how to confront A.I.’s insidious ascendency, or the responsibility of cultural institutions to retain historical knowledge.

See less. Triangulate better.◼︎