When notice of “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented” arrived in my inbox, I gave the e-mail a cursory scan and promptly deposited it in my trash folder. Knowing that curators have a tendency to overlay contemporary mores onto historical precedent, I feared this moma show would have “Woke” stamped all over it. The exhibition title reminded me of the initial wave of political correctness some thirty years ago. At that time, “cultural worker” had been mooted as a replacement for the word “artist”—the latter carrying with it the gamey stench of elitism. Starry-eyed soul that I am, I thought “cultural worker” had long been consigned to the circular file of post-Marxist assaults on the language. A quick surf of the internet proved otherwise: “cultural worker” has become part of the lingua franca for the enlightened among us. There is, I learned, an organization dubbed Cultural Workers Organize—its stated mission being the fomentation of “collective responses to precarity.” It’s a hop, skip, and click from this kind of thing to engineers, agitators, and constructors.

“Precarity” was, in fact, my state of mind when I visited momaand wandered into “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor.” The first thing to be read on the introductory wall text is that “the title ‘artist’ is an insult.” The exhibition catalogue goes further, including what appears to be a snippet of free verse: “No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians . . . no more, no more, no more, nothing, nothing, nothing.”