The Brooklyn Rail

Human flight, for thousands and thousands of years, was confined to the dream realm. Who’d dare imagine such a thing in the daytime? It was a physical impossibility, of course, and, besides, there were much more urgent matters at hand—witches, for example, and plagues, and nihilism (the trinity of which, coincidentally, would later go on to invent Art Basel Miami).

One Benedictine monk in the eleventh century, though, named Eilmer of Malmesbury, did more than just dream about human flight. In a crude Daedalus pastiche, Eilmer leapt from a tower of great heights with fantastic wings strapped to his arms. As many (including gravity) predicted, he shattered his legs moments later, upon what must’ve been a shocking return to earth.

Eilmer wasn’t the first of his kind, nor would he be the last: people leapt out of towers with homemade wings on their backs for millennia and never took flight, not even once.

They kept at it, though, and then, all of a sudden in the twentieth century, it happened: first, we got a glider, then a jet, then we were in space, then on the moon. In the span of about fifty years, human beings everywhere were flying all over the place, and out of this world.

The whole situation was radical, but what about its denouement? Today, we fly on the same planes, at the same speeds, on the same routes we did years ago. We haven’t been back to the moon since 1972, and we haven’t been anywhere else, either. What we’ve got, it seems, is as good as it gets. And it’s getting worse: today’s “innovations” in flight occur only at the margins—smaller seats, leaner compliance crews, mandatory self-service for a fee.

Airlines, apparently, would rather plunder the margins than reach for the stars. Eilmer of Malmesbury would, no doubt, be appalled.

And that’s because Eilmer of Malmesbury was, no doubt, an artist, and artists reach beyond.

So I wonder what Eilmer would think of art today. Would he see the resurgence of modernist painting as profound? The sweeping ideological monotony as fertile? The uniform aversion to AI as intrepid? Would he appreciate how we’ve reversed course on the avant-garde predilections of last century, bucking momentum in favor of a voluntary stasis?

I, too, wonder what Eilmer would think of our schools, especially those MFA programs that emphasize the paths of least resistance. The ones that advocate for strategies of rhetorical preening and self-validating research over anything visceral; whose classrooms stopped functioning as playgrounds for ambiguity long ago; that reward frictionless faculty with tenure, and in so doing tacitly encourage students to play nice, lest their true selves get in the way of a career.

And what about our biennials—our best-of-the-best, our most topical, our grandest stage? Would Eilmer praise their curators? The ones who respond to a society on “the edge of collapse” by recommending gestures of imperceptible resistance (as they did in the New Museum’s most recent triennial)? Whose shows “probe the cracks and fissures” of the day, evidently only to simplify and echo common complaints of a broken present (as was the case in 2024’s Whitney Biennial)? Who go so far as to eschew a throughline altogether, positioning their show as a signifier of “many things to many people” in a gesture of blanket appeasement (as with the Hammer Museum’s 2025 Biennial)?

If Eilmer believed in art the same way he believed in flight—radically, unapologetically, illogically—would he be encouraged by all this?

Remember, this is Eilmer of Malmesbury we’re talking about—the man who flew. Who was thrilled by what could be. The one who pushed the limits of form, experimented without fear, and chased his instincts to the chagrin of natural law. To the chagrin of everybody, really, even himself. To whom accusations of harmful, narcissistic, and downright idiotic behavior were about as effective a deterrent as ping pong balls are to a raging bull, absurd little hiccups considering the magnitude of his vision’s promise.

Whatever art is right now, Eilmer might say, we ought to break away from it. We’ve been through a decade of sycophancy, fail-safes, and over-consideration. Our artists feel as wretched and sexless as corporate middle managers, and as irrelevant, too. We’re playing within the frame of a game whose boundaries were proven porous years ago.

We’ve stuck ourselves in the midst of a Great Retread. Unless we want to continue in the way of air travel, it’s not a series of calculated nudges that we need, but a dissenting chorus of failed and damaging leaps.