A wise old art historian once said: “You can ask any question you want, but you have to have a method for answering it.” However, you don’t have to be an art historian to write insightfully about contemporary culture. As many of the recent contributors to our new Forum make clear, it only takes handful of well-chosen references, deployed with care, to respond critically to a changing world.

A case in point is Joana Kawahara Lino’s recent post “On the Super Bowl-ification of Digital Art”, a sharp commentary on the way the supposedly borderless, decentralized digital art world still runs on Eastern Standard Time. Her argument rests on a succinct, sturdy genealogy — invoking Guy Debord on the spectacle, Terry Smith’s 1974 “provincialism problem,” and Byung-Chul Han on attention as scarce resource — proving that rigor and accessibility can live together.

This week, we published a profile of Cao Fei, who has made a habit of predicting the future over the last two decades. Long before the “metaverse” became a marketing term, she built an entire city in Second Life. Meanwhile, in her essay on Off-Grid Aesthetics, Primavera De Filippi maps the “golden cage” of promptable latent space — and what it takes to escape it — arguing that a genuinely AI-native aesthetic lives in the regions no text prompt can reach.

On the basis that theorizing the future requires mindfulness of the past, we are excited by the launch of Creative Intelligence as a new three-day festival at London’s Southbank Centre, marking 75 years since the Festival of Britain united artists and scientists to imagine a different post-war future.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

The Right Click Save Index is a knowledge bank drawn from across the magazine’s editorial coverage. It shows how people, artworks, events, organizations, and ideas connect in our archive of more than 420 articles. Rather than a comprehensive biography or dictionary definition, each page surfaces the salient elements from throughout our ecosystem.

Readers can access the Index from the navigation bar of the website, through the Search window, and, as of this week, from in-article “cards” that link to Index entries, or direct to articles in the Magazine archive.

This week’s essay by the artist Primavera De Filippi carries in-article visual links to De Filippi’s Index entry as well as to her recent Forum post on being surprised by AI

This week’s report on the forthcoming Creative Intelligence festival, in London, carries in-article links to texts from the Right Click Save archive about institutional shows from New York and London that are coming to the festival in September 2026

William Mapan, Sketchbook A #64, 2023. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Image via x.com/leyla_solos