How could art historians, critics, and curators think about principals of emergence in terms of their own research?
STEVEN: Well, I think emergence is a very powerful model for how movements happen. Take chaos theory, which is closely related to the idea of emergence. To put it in the simplest terms, before chaos theory, scientists used to study stable systems. But chaos theory was interested in the little transition point between two knowable states. It was not a celebration of chaos it was a way of looking at systems that we had previously thought to be chaotic and finding laws that underlay them. To me, there is a comparable opening right now in terms of our study of artistic and social movements. It’s increasingly pressing, because the technology is advancing so quickly and culture has sped up so rapidly that we are in almost permanent transition now. Instead of having twenty years exploring modernism, twenty years of postmodernism, and then twenty years of something else now the changes are coming every five years. ANNE: In my line of work, I have to participate in a lot of negotiations with in
