Ninety-nine percent of the people who saw Galindo pass by had probably never heard the phrase “performance art,” but I doubt many didn’t immediately grasp the piece’s symbolism: the ghostly footprints of hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered, overwhelmingly by the Army, during Guatemala’s recent years of war. Sure, it was act of memory and defiance in the face of an official culture of enforced forgetting and impunity. But what was the piece’s purpose? She looked so lonely and fragile. She evoked futility, solitude, even fear more than protest. One felt terribly frightened for her; but also of her, a little. She might have been a mad widow. There was something disturbing, haunting, and even mythological about Galindo’s performance, something like a Kafka parable. The people who witnessed it were probably affected in many private ways. I can’t say what the piece’s actual purpose was, and I think had she had declared one, it would have diminished its power.

The “localized crises” of Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S. are certainly part of the same “systemic” catastrophe. Guatemala is practically a narco state; Mexico very nearly is. U.S. drug consumption and arms fuel the crisis, which is also a consequence of its political-economic-military history in the region. Poverty breeds waves of mostly peasant migrants and fills the ranks of narco assassins. Both Mexico and Guatemala have greedy upper classes without any sense of civil responsibility, but so, apparently, does the U.S. Anything that might be considered a “classical” symbol of any of these three nations now only evokes kitsch and hypocrisy.

Here in Mexico, we are seeing some interesting artistic responses to the situation. I am not sure any of them reflect an aesthetic way forward that is also a practical political one; I am not sure there is a way forward that anyone might be able to define. But there are basic obvious principles and values that need to be defended.

The most potent new work of political art I’ve seen is a collaboration between Mexican journalists and artists, 72 Migrantes, conceived by writer-journalist Alma Guillermoprieto. It’s a “virtual altar”—there’s a combination of modern technology and classical Mexican folk art for you—memorializing the seventy-two U.S.-bound migrants massacred by the Zeta drug cartel in Taumalipas earlier this year, an epoch-defining crime that was ready to disappear from official and public consciousness as soon as the story moved off the front pages. Each participating writer contributed a text in the name of one of the dead. Some did journalistic legwork to write in a personal way about the victim; others contributed more poetic or thoughtful general texts. Photographers and musicians were enlisted as well. Alma insisted that none of the contributions could have a specific political agenda—against President Felipe Calderón, for example—and that is undoubtedly one source of the site’s power: it has a purity of intent and execution that recalls our oldest ideas of classical beauty, while also being a highly contemporary response to the baffling and ghastly inhumanity of our times.

My point is this: if impotent as activism, art still has something to offer even if its value becomes clear only retrospectively. Garnering a clear sense of the efficacy of art as it unfolds may be more difficult than ever in an age fixated on immediacy and endless forms of distraction. To use a classical analogy, if we cannot face upheavals and unbearable truths head on, art can serve as Perseus’s shield vis-à-vis Medusa, refracting petrifying glimpses of the real. Art is a language and can offer symbolic fodder for future thought. And so we must remain vigilant, patiently attuned to artistic practices that record both impressions and effects of cataclysmic events and conditions. The paramount challenge today for cultural critics or intellectuals is to create inclusive frameworks to bridge the gaps not only between art and the public but also between art and life. As observers and participants, we need first to register and then to analyze what we perceive as we make sense of the local versus the systemic. I don’t believe that art is failing, or that we don’t have venues in which to experience it; rather, we are plagued by our own distraction, the very behavior that was already preoccupying Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in 1936: the year of the Berlin Olympics featured in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.

Lest I seem naïve, we should remember that Group Material, ACT UP, David Wojnarowicz, and, more recently, Zoe Leonard enacted calls to arms for the AIDS crisis in what remain deeply moving ways beginning in the 1980s. And artists such as VALIE EXPORT, Dara Birnbaum, Adrian Piper, and you, Martha, have made great strides in the name of feminism since the 1960s. And yet while struggles rooted in race, class, and gender persist—not just physical wars—artists continue to generate other lenses to bring these conflicts into focus. Art continues to provoke conversation as lethal tensions erupt across the globe. If we are patient enough to look and to listen, we can appreciate how Alfredo Jaar has redirected our gaze to Rwanda and Nigeria. Resistance Art in South Africa under apartheid, the dissident movements in Eastern Europe, and Lebanese artists responding to the Lebanese Civil War make clear that artistic resistance is alive and well if we look beyond the West. And as playwright David Hare reminds us in Stuff Happens (2004), theater and performance remain vital media for questioning the war in Iraq. Our appreciation of these sorts of interventions, however, demands slowing down long enough to take Benjamin’s prescribed medicine: apperception.

Borrowing a tiny piece of your remark on Anderson, classicism, and elites: first, since the United States has neither aristocracy nor peasantry (our land claims stem not from anything autochthonous but rather from conquest), our modernism can perhaps be seen as a nervous reaction to European modernism. (See Andreas Huyssen, in such works as After the Great Divide [1986].) We should also recall the false mantle of an assumed, British-accent-inflected “aristocracism” of the National Review’s brand of right-wing ideology, particularly under its founder William Buckley, and carried on by the soi-disant New Criterion, which in both cases led to a rigid defense of aesthetic formalism. Now we find it defended under the seemingly opposed rubric of biopower and post-Fordist immaterial labor, in the announcement of an upcoming twentieth-anniversary symposium for the journal Texte zur Kunst:

"This symposium investigates art criticism's potential to become social critique. . . . In 1990, returning to the methods of social art history promised to link current artistic production to larger economic and ideological frameworks. Even if this approach has remained an important touchstone, . . . new models have emerged: discussions around biopolitics and immaterial labor . . . have radically questioned long-held methodological assumptions about the visual arts' potentially antagonistic role in the capitalist societies of the West. . . . The notion of the aesthetic, which had for many years been utterly dismissed due to its association with idealist concepts of autonomy, has returned in unforeseen ways—by way of a recourse, for instance, to an emphatic and ethically motivated defense of aesthetic experience and an immersive attention to formal detail."

Here we see the recent return to some variety of Adorno-derived artistic autonomy, in one of the least autonomous moments of art production in the developed world, attempted not by artists but by a vanguardist critical establishment (an oxymoron, perhaps), attempting to reassert its dominance over art’s claims to criticality.

To dwell a bit on the question of capitalism in crisis, invoking Mexico is, in my opinion, to point to the travails of the periphery in a globalizing era, where wealth is consolidated in the hands of a very small class in control of internationalized capital and where traditional, particularly agrarian, modes of production are subsumed—as sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre pointed out long ago, in, for example, The Urban Revolution (1970)—under the regime of the highly urbanized advanced industrial economies. (I venture to suggest that the Mexican art that the internationalized art world generally gets to see is, in consequence, refracted through the lens of the circulation of capital in that system.)

I am lousy at prognostication, only slightly better at diagnosis, so I will not try to guess what the current crisis might bring, though the students in Great Britain have my highest sympathies; we once again see the U.S. and the U.K., as in the 1980s, marching in tandem, furthering the neoliberalization of education and its conversion into a factory for production of workers skilled in instrumentalized knowledge, now drawn all the more from among the ranks of the international elite.