New Models

This is a preview | For the full conversation, an annotated photo diary of Artforum’s old 7th Ave office, and access to New Models’ back catalogue, subscribe https://patreon.com/newmodels or https://newmodels.substack.com

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Our guests are Artforum co-editors Rachel Wetzler and Daniel Wenger. When the two stepped into the role this spring, the magazine, like nearly all print media and the art world at large, was wading through something of a backloop. But three issues in, a new era of the publication seems underway—one in which the magazine leans into being based in New York, and its exacting art criticism applies not just to the art on the wall but potentially to anything that operates on and through culture.

In Rachel and Daniel’s hands, major exhibition reviews follows essays demystifying the creative logic of generative AI or a visit to a midtown Manhattan shop selling bank vaults; meanwhile, a heartfelt essay by Nairy Baghramian on the life of her gallerist Marian Goodman sits just as naturally on the page as a piece by Simon Denny on the aesthetics of Palantir.

Reading, you might think: could art criticism become the ur-mode for making sense of the world now? We talk to Rachel and Daniel about their vision for the magazine and their own backstories.

Then in post, Carly, who worked at Artforum from 2008 to 2014, added some meta-commentary on the digital shift and an impression of the Artforum she knew. Daniel and Rachel responded, also in post, with an impression of the Artforum that now is. This ep is sort of like a live-edited Google Doc in the form of a podcast. We hope you enjoy.

https://www.artforum.com/issue/2026/may-2026-1234741944/

This is a preview | For full audio and show notes plus extras, subscribe via https://patreon.com/newmodels or https://newmodels.substack.com

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After a month in North America, we’re back—coming to you from Berlin with some reflections on that time and thoughts on the AI doomstorm that’s defined this year’s fall rentrée.

Lil Net, currently writing on Bernadette Corporation’s film Get Rid of Yourself (2003) for the Julia Stoschek Foundation, draws a path from Y2K era empire to the blackboxed Cthulhu it’s become today.

"The twin towers didn't fall, they were uploaded." — Lil Net

Carly, involved in a local land-use dispute over a country road, notes how, at least in the US, there’s no civic mechanism to value the intangible benefits of something that’s slower and higher-friction, only its measurable “improvement.”

Plus: trance music and Y2K airport globalism; birth of the non-space; 9/11; the contentification of theorems; data centers; and the K-shaped everything.

“They are themselves so astonished that they can do these things. And they have so much fun in doing it. But they miss a little bit more of intelligence. Strategic intelligence [...] they are too confused because they are too astonished about their own being made.” — Werner von Delmont (Stephen Dillemuth) in BC’s Get Rid of Yourself (2003)

https://newmodels.io

Every summer, we return to the land of our youth, the Mid-Atlantic USA and, as has become tradition, relay our impressions of it to you. With this episode, @Lilinternet unpacks the 36 hours he spent just trying to get to the States, navigating a labyrinth of apps, regulations, platforms, self-ordering kiosks, loyalty programs, waitlists, dynamic pricing, seat assignments, Star Alliances and accelerating arches in an atmosphere defined by algorithms.

This is a preview | For full audio and show notes plus extras, subscribe via https://patreon.com/newmodels or https://newmodels.substack.com

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Artist Simon Denny returns to New Models to discuss the American defense tech sector's newfound dedication to aesthetics.

Distilling the branding languages of companies like a16z, Palantir, and Anduril—which draw heavily on Italian Futurism, return-to-order neoclassicism, and the graphic idiom of modernist institutions—Denny shows techno-libertarian leaders to be positioning themselves as a progressive counter-elite, priming the public to receive its revanchist turn toward miltarism as natural, just, and inevitable.

"Why is Andreessen reaching for art and culture? He doesn't have to reach for culture... What is useful for him in reaching back toward Futurism… ?"

This conversation builds on “Epic Fury: the Dark Art of Defense Tech” Simon’s feature for the May 2026 issue of Artforum; as well as his installation “Monsters Between Worlds” with Venkatesh Rao, which is on view in Venice as part of Palazzo Diedo’s “Strange Rules” exhibition (through Nov. 21); and “Rules Based Order” in Munich, his solo show at Gallery Kraupa-Tuskany-Ziedler.

https://simondenny.net/

This is a preview | For full audio and show notes plus extras, subscribe via https://patreon.com/newmodels or https://newmodels.substack.com

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When Enlightenment-era scholars taxonomized humankind, they chose homo sapiens, in part because of what they observed as a uniquely human aptitude for “taste.”

[“Taste” comes from the Latin taxare (to handle, to assess) – an intensive form of tangere (to touch). It is a term that via vulgar Latin blended with gustare (to taste, to try) to express the act of appraising something by physically handling or even consuming it. In proper Latin, there is the related term sapere, which carries a double meaning of “to taste” and “to be wise.” To taste, in the sense of sapere, is to possess wisdom through tangible experience.]

It’s remarkable that in recent years, and intensely in recent months, the idea of “taste”—“having taste,” “deploying taste,” “taste agents,” “integrating a taste layer,” “taste as a core skill,” “taste as moat”—has become an ultra-present concern in tech circles. Isn’t having taste (wherever one falls along the taste spectrum) an inherent quality of being human?

To be sure, there’s already a lot of writing on this phenomenon: “Tasteslop” by NEMESIS‘s Emily Segal and “Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed With Taste” by Kyle Chayka for the New Yorker being among the best takes. The most confounding, in our opinion being Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham’s “Taste for Makers” (Feb 2002, but highly cited this year).

There is also “Against Taste,” by Will Manidis, which makes some good points (patrons used to fund art for a higher power or at least public display whereas contemporary collectors tend to buy art for their own private use) but in its theory-of-everything aspiration, feels LLM-ish and contextually ahistorical. So in pure “Content Today” form, we are adding to the pile-on with our own fashionably late, probably factually botched but definitely human, free-associative conversation about taste.

This is a public post. For all New Models, subscribe!

https://patreon.com/newmodels | https://newmodels.substack.com

In recent episodes, you’ve heard us mention the project we created this spring with Joshua Citarella, together with the spatial design studio sub, for “Strange Rules” at Palazzo Diedo, Venice. On this episode, we chat with Josh about this work. The exhibition, which was curated by Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli, presents practices that engage with the "protocol layer” — in other words, the rules that determine how culture is created, transmitted, remembered.

For more text & images:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/online-of-ideas-160600874

https://substack.com/home/post/p-201216984

Joshua Citarella / Doomscroll: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4pEm3-yshBWa7nH3sQIKHQ

This is preview (full ep released to subscribers 06/03/2026) — to access all our content & to join the NM Discord, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com

We talk a lot on this show about the “content” layer being compromised; how, given the physics of the feed, the creative act increasingly happens at the protocol level. While this is true, good books and films and records are, in fact, still being made. On this ep, friend of New Models Steven Warwick comes by on the occasion of his two new albums — "Live at Café Oto" (P-A-N) and, from his new band with Iván Brito, GUSH, "Splash of Milk" (Huntleys + Palmers) — to chat about making music, touring, and putting out albums in 2026.

https://p-a-n.org/product/steven-warwi…iveatcafeoto-pan163/

https://huntleyspalmers.bandcamp.com/album/gush…of-milk-lp

For more:

https://instagram.com/ohmygushhhhh

https://instagram.com/sweetie_darling_bebe

https://stevenwarwick.info

This is preview (full ep released to subscribers 04/17/2026) — to access all our content & to join the NM Discord, subscribe: patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com

"Anyone that claims they understand the world — this immediately marks them out as a fraud."

— Kevin Lee Kharas

After the imperial collapse (40 global offices, thousands of employees, bankruptcy), VICE magazine is now run by a lean, London-based team — and it is making one of the best culture publications currently in circulation. Ben Ditto (Vice global editorial director; founder of Ditto Nation; creative dir. Yaya Labs; founding creative dir. Dazed Beauty) and Kevin Lee Kharas (Vice editor-in-chief and co-founder of the electronic duo @real_lies ) come on New Models to discuss their current “Not The Photo Issue” (feat. Dean Kissick x Adam Curtis, Bertie Brandes, Mat Dryhurst, Günseli Yalcinkaya, Duncan Wilson, and others) and their media philosophy at large.

Subscribe to VICE:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/introducing-the-not-the-photo-issue-of-vice-magazine-pre-order-now/

For more:

NM49 | GPT Ditto w/ Ben Ditto: https://soundcloud.com/newmodels/gpt-ditto-w-ben-ditto-nm49

This is preview — to access full episode and all New Models' content, subscribe: https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com

We’re joined by media scholars Daniël de Zeeuw & Sal Hagen, who have been closely tracking the weirder end of the internet for over a decade—their research and analysis of 4chan has made them low-key legends within internet studies. As 4chan’s logic is now pervasive across the social web, Daniël and Sal, together with their colleagues at the Amsterdam-based OILab, have been modeling novel ways of thinking about our current communication space that travel well beyond the network media / public sphere template to something far stranger — and more accurate.

For more:

https://oilab.eu/

https://salhagen.nl/

https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/z/e/d.dezeeuw/d.dezeeuw.html

Hagen, S., de Zeeuw, D., & Venturini, T. (2025). Digital Rhythmanalysis: Studying Memetic and Affective Rhythms on the Post-Viral Web. Platforms & Society, 2.

de Zeeuw, D., Birchall, C., & Knight, P. (2025). On Psyop Realism. Cultural Politics, 21(2), 240-257

Hagen, S. (2024) Reactionary Rhythm: Quali-quantitative studies of 4chan/pol/. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam


Hagen, S., & de Zeeuw, D. (2023). Based and confused: Tracing the political connotations of a memetic phrase across the web. Big Data & Society, 10(1)

Nepost

This is an unlocked epdisode first released to subscribers 03/02/2026 — to access all our content & to join the NM Discord, subscribe: patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com

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We speak often in the New Model sphere about scanning and sensing rather than reading—communication through vibes. Peli Grietzer is a comparative literature PhD (Harvard) who has spent over a decade developing a rigorous theory of what a “vibe" actually is, how we increasingly follow ineffable cues to navigate our world and these, taken together, in fact exist as empirical objects in mathematical space. On this episode, Peli joins NM to talk about his work for a more general audience.

For more: @peligrietzer (X & IG)


Substack: Second Balcony
(https://peligrietzer.substack.com/)

Theory of a Vibe (https://www.glass-bead.org/wp-content/uploads/GB_Site-1_Peli-Grietzer_Eng.pdf)

Theory of a Vibe ’25 (https://peligrietzer.substack.com/p/theory-of-vibe-25)