Gabriel Orozco Recontextualizes Albert Einstein's "Why Socialism?" Through the Lens of Contemporary Art & Politics @ Kurimanzutto New York

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.

text by Poppy Baring

Albert Einstein’s 1949 essay, “Why Socialism?” is as relevant now as it was almost seventy-five years ago. Featuring numerous artists’ responses to the essay, artist and curator Gabriel Orozco opens the show with a refined version of the text, presented as a collage of modest photocopies. Themes that are still eerily close to those that swell in today’s discourse are included, such as “private capital tends to be concentrated in few hands,” “legislative bodies are selected by political parties largely financed by private capitalists,” “production is carried on for profit not for use,” and “an exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student who is trained to worship acquisitive success.”

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman

These brief summaries of Albert Einstein’s contestations of capitalism are still echoed in media today. In a recent interview with comedian Marc Maron, Barack Obama spoke about how our culture is geared toward consumption, material goods, and fame. The author Scott Galloways, when speaking with Piers Morgan, notes that innovation has somehow excused depravity, citing Elon Musk as a clear example. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI and winner of the 2024 Nobel prize, warned audiences of the danger of digital beings created by companies motivated by short-term profits. The answer to these issues suggested by Einstein in “Why Socialism?” is a socialist economy and an educational system orientated towards social goals.

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.

While visitors are left with political thoughts ruminating, they enter the almost all black-and-white main room of the exhibition and approach large grayscale flags of United Nations members, made by Wilfredo Prieto in a piece called “Apolitico.” Their loss of color strips away any signs of allegiance or patriotism and presents these flags as interchangeable. Other works, such as Ariel Schlesinger’s “Burnt Newspapers,” show the fragility of historical records, which is brought up again in the final and most shocking part of the exhibition, “The Pegasus Stories” by Forensic Architecture. 

This video on digital violence reveals the terrifying real-life experiences of international human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, and activists whose devices were infected and monitored by corporations using Pegasus, a destructive software developed by the Israeli cyber-weapons manufacturer NSO Group. Initially developed as just one part of Israel’s mass surveillance of Palestinians, Pegasus is now being used to target individuals across forty-five countries. In the passage for visitors to read before watching the film, they explain the American government’s public rejections of the software, as contrasted with its private acquisition of some of its tools from the NSO group’s U.S affiliate, epitomizing American hypocrisy and depravity at its finest.

This exhibition exposes visitors to an array of artists’ responses to Einstein’s essay. The stories reported in the final film are enough to leave you speechless, and overall, this display provides a dark and scary reflection of our current reality, which indeed supplies an answer to the question being posed.

Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.

Featured artists include Ariel Schlesinger, Forensic Architecture, Minerva Cuevas, Petrit Halilaj, Robert Longo, Roman Ondak, Wilfredo Prieto, Zoe Leonard, and special guests.

Why Socialism? By Albert Einstein is on view through October 18 at Kurimanzutto 516 W 20th St, New York

Otherwise Part II: Art & Power; The Professional Managerial Class, Administrative Aesthetics, and the Big Data Sublime

Philippe Parreno, Anywhere out of the world, Pinault Collection 2022

text by Perry Shimon

The development of art as a category in Western thought has historically unfolded alongside shifting regimes of power. The Pinault Collection in Paris, housed in the historic Bourse de Commerce building, embodies three centuries of such shifts, providing a palimpsest of ideological progression. Built in the 1760s as a circular grain hall, its form symbolized the monarchy’s role in securing bread supplies and maintaining social order. In the 19th century, it was transformed into the Commodities Exchange, trading sugar, coffee, cocoa, and other goods, capped with an iron-and-glass dome, and encircled by murals romanticizing France’s colonial ambitions—while simultaneously obscuring histories of dispossession, slavery, and genocide. By the late 20th century, the building’s economic function had faded, and in the 21st century it reemerged as a cultural landmark under the Pinault Collection, marking the shift from mercantile and industrial power to finance and cultural capital.

Architect Tadao Ando was commissioned to erect a massive concrete silo in the rotunda, the most ubiquitous material of capitalist infrastructure. Within, artists such as Philippe Pareno staged interventions articulating a Silicon Valley ethos of big data capture and biosensing. 2022’s group exhibition Une seconde d’éternité featured a Pareno “bioreactor” that controlled lights, sounds, and movement in the rotunda, with a “brain” conditioned by externally captured data—temperature, noise, humidity, and light—effectively turning the space into a responsive, sensing environment. The iron-and-glass dome itself now reads as a kind of observing eye, reinforcing the aesthetic of surveillance and technological governance.

Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection

The neoliberal age, and its technologies of administration, are the primary object of study in this collection of essays. The valuation and management of social, attentional, and affective energies—enclosed and expropriated by platform capitalism—are fundamentally restructuring life and producing a distinct aesthetic regime. This regime is administered by what Barbara and John Ehrenreich termed the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC): “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production, and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” The Ehrenreichs noted that this class is increasingly vulnerable to the very systems it sustains, a vulnerability amplified by AI automation of administrative duties.

The Professional-Managerial artist today devotes much of their labor to evaluative, data-centered activities: producing statements, obtaining credentials, developing proposals, submitting applications, building CVs, applying for grants, professional networking, producing social media content, sending and receiving emails, designing PDFs, producing promotional videos, and filling in spreadsheets. Artistic production is often dictated by institutional mandates; demands explicit rhetorical framing, measurable “impact,” and quantifiable metrics. While these tasks have become de-facto expectations for the professional artist, many artists reflexively engage these same practices in their work, while interrogating the logics that govern them.

Taryn Simon, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2011

Some of the most compelling examples emerge from artists who deploy these practices with fluency while maintaining criticality. Taryn Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2008–2011) explores eighteen family lineages across 25 countries, addressing genocide, genetic engineering, human trafficking, and state propaganda. Simon employs a poetic variation of social-scientific methods to comment on how knowledge and institutional systems are structured.

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Anatomy of an AI, 2018

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an AI is a massive data visualization that functions across galleries, a dedicated website, and contextual texts. The project maps the production of an Amazon Echo in a systemic, planetary-scale cartography, extending beyond supply chain analysis to reveal labor exploitation, material extraction, and ecological impact. In the gallery context, the immersive scale evokes Kantian awe: a sense of sublime cognitive overwhelm as viewers confront global networks of extraction, labor, and data capture. The work highlights the social and ecological implications of corporate superpowers while reflecting the epistemic and administrative protocols of the neoliberal PMC subject.

Forensic Architecture, website homepage, September, 2025

Forensic Architecture describes itself as “a research agency developing and disseminating new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence,” comprising architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers. Their work employs compelling evidentiary aesthetics toward counter-hegemonic social justice in legal and cultural contexts, representing an expanded notion of multi-authored juridical poetics and political intervention. Investigations address state violence, human rights abuses, environmental destruction, and corporate complicity, using tools such as 3D modeling, satellite imagery, open-source video analysis, and architectural reconstruction.

Jonas Staal Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, 2022

Jonas Staal explores intersections of art, politics, and ecological-social systems, expanding democratic practice through experimental public architectures and civic platforms. His projects examine how political ideologies, institutions, and infrastructures shape collective life, engaging with broader concerns of planetary governance and more-than-human agency. Collaborative and ongoing projects include The New World Summit, The Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, and The Interplanetary Species Society: a large-scale installation and series of assemblies in a former nuclear facility challenging neocolonial and extractivist logics in space exploration and political organization, while proposing cooperative and multispecies approaches to governance.

These artists, through explicitly political and socially engaged practices, adopt the aesthetic and administrative protocols of the Professional-Managerial Class. Their work of resistance, however, risks structural affirmation, echoing Audre Lorde’s caution against attempting to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.