For Benjamin, the horror of our historical trajectory lies in the Angel’s inability to close his wings. What prevents that closure is the insistent storm of “progress,” the stubborn belief of liberals, fascists, and communists alike that technology and rational control are positive forces that merely have to be harnessed to their respective utopian projects. The political ideology of the modern world—the storm pushing to reach the “Paradise” of modernity’s impossible utopias—is in fact violent, Benjamin thinks, precisely because it cannot or will not make that which is truly valuable in the past whole and tangible to the present. The powerful may monumentalize historical icons in order to glorify the state in the present, but this is merely in order to further cement the belief that they are legitimately carrying us all forward into a better future. What they will not permit is any chance for the wretched, for those suffering at the base of the social pyramid, to come to know the past that is really relevant to them.

Benjamin’s usefulness for the writing of “critiques” in the contemporary academy has muted, even eclipsed, the theo-political intensity of this revolutionary anarchism. He has become a kind of Che Guevara for a portion of the intelligentsia that feels it must talk the talk but cannot begin to imagine how to walk the walk. Some are embarrassed by his ardency, by his conviction that Art and Politics and History are One, and that getting them right is about saving the world by ending the one we know. Some grumble that his work is too cryptic. But the truth is that his writing is not hard to understand; it is hard to look at directly. His aphoristic fragments singe like solar flares: “The only way of knowing a person is to love that person without hope.” Who can survive that test? Who today would dare to read Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal or Blanqui’s prison writings on astronomy as serious reports on the state of damnation of the modern world? Who is prepared to say that social media, AI, and robotic automation are not just the products of neoliberalism, “the society of control,” and lack of oversight—but visions of Hell? I’m not saying that Benjamin doesn’t see any redemptive opportunities in culture and technology or that our own speculations on such are not worthwhile—he does and they are. But it is undeniable that the intellectual culture of the present has come to relish that part of Benjamin’s work without committing to, or taking seriously, his anarchist and messianic call for a revolutionary politics. To continue in Benjamin’s terms, if the intellectual classes can stroll up to the precipice, look over, and decide it’s not yet time to leap, then they will not be the ones to bring the light of redemption to the people.

Walker figured out how to make the cutout congeal into chirography, a signature effect that seizes us, and to which we cannot be indifferent.

What is supremely profitable today is contemporary art. How profitable? In 2019, a work called Rabbit by the artist Jeff Koons sold at auction for $91 million, setting a new record for a living artist. Walker’s work fetches hefty sums too. Yet aesthetically, and more importantly, ethically, I think they are radically and diametrically opposed. Still, they are worth pondering together, Walker’s Subtlety and Koon’s Rabbit. Because they stand before us like signs at a fork in the road, indicating the options ahead. Both are signatures of contemporary Americana. Neither could have been produced anywhere other than in the USA. Both express in remarkably accurate terms an ugliness unique to our culture. Walker’s art tells us more than we want to hear about the ugliness of our past. Koons’s silver bunny shows us the ugliness of our present, and—if we do nothing to alter its course—the ugly emptiness of our future. By polishing away any possible connection to the past, and glibly seeking succor in false innocence and false universality, Koons has produced perhaps the whitest art, ideologically not ethnically, ever created. Even the white bourgeoisie no longer find its shock value palatable. In a scathing review some years ago, Jed Perl called a Koons retrospective “a multimillion-dollar mausoleum in which everything that was ever lively and challenging about avant-gardism and Dada and Duchamp has gone to die.” There is no real laughter, no genuine embarrassment to be had in the presence of a Koons. Irritation, indifference, transient fascination, titillation? Maybe—but never embarrassment. How could you be embarrassed? Koons, not unlike Donald Trump, is a pure pure troll: one who sees that in a society obsessed with shaming the ultimate sign of freedom, superiority, and success is shamelessness tout court, and it sells itself. It is the triumph of pure appearance—the art and politics of a deathless, lifeless, narrative-free future.