Art has always had a strange relation to power, whether in the service of royals and merchants or as a form for revolutionary vanguards’ imagination. Today the relationship has become even more complex, especially as the structures that have underwritten contemporary art shift beneath our feet—open markets close, soft power hardens into war, and populist sentiment becomes public life. One can say that, on a very high level, power itself has become highly unstable. In this special issue of e-flux journal, guest editor Mi You proposes that this instability is accompanied by a malleability, but also by a problem of representation that demands the immediacy of realism: a transfer of hopes and expectations to a calculus of means and ends. What would it mean to tactically revisit sites of oppression like capital and the state, but as fluid bodies that might be repurposed as levers? If art still corresponds to social progress, do notions like freedom and equality need new vision or should we rather prepare for what follows their ruin?

Over the past three decades, the global art world has thrived thanks to the infrastructures of peak globalization; it has consequently internalized value systems that are embedded in the alignment between liberal democracy, the progressive state, and neoliberal metrics of economic stability. This alignment produces auxiliary notions in the art world that operate quite self-sufficiently—notions about certain artistic forms of production or distribution that embody liberal and progressive values in themselves, and about artistic “freedom” as a condition, rather than a product, of the system.

Whether this documenta should be defended is not the question. The question is how it can be defended in a way that also allows for a constructive critique of the exhibition.