Many canonical 20th-century artworks are considered important in part because they were ahead of their time, from Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to Andy Warhol’s screen prints. Marshall McLuhan’s midcentury assertion—that art functions as a “Distant Early Warning system … tell[ing] the old culture what is beginning to happen to it”—encapsulates a common belief about art’s prognostic value. But the time when traditional artistic media could tell us about the future may be mostly in the past.

While art can still serve a vanguard function in the early 21st century, the mainstream culture’s rate of change has accelerated dramatically; on social media and in the news, hordes of people are busy reporting its every move. Keeping up with the present—let alone getting ahead of it—has become harder than ever, and any forward-looking artworks today will necessarily look different from those of the past.

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My hunch is that the contemporary artworks likeliest to one day appear prescient, albeit not always in reassuring ways, will come from para-artistic digital practices, whether artistic experiments with AI; so-called Red Chip art (which Annie Armstrong of Artnet News defines as works with flashy aesthetics that abjure art history); or folk forms such as NFTs, memes, or TikTok lore videos. What these practices have in common is not just that they’re relatively new, with strong ties to digital culture, but also that they’re only somewhat recognizable as great art, or even art at all, under our inherited value systems. Traditionalists gasp, often justifiably, at the ethical and aesthetic challenges AI art poses, or at Red Chip art’s tawdriness, or at digital folk art’s simplicity. But such practices are telling the old culture what’s happening to it, even if the message isn’t what most fine arts audiences want to hear.

What about all the painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance that people still love to make and see? They’re n