Amid all the cultural changes surrounding us every day, one of the most consequential has gone entirely unnoticed. We have not had a major artistic movement, in literature or art, for something like 30 years, not since the various offspring of postmodernism blew themselves out in the early 1980s.

Artistic movements were once engines that helped to power the culture and to shape the way that people looked at reality. In the present moment, when so much of our public life is simultaneously polarized and murky, it is striking to remember how an artistic movement could clarify the world around it, project the image of alternate possibilities and challenge artists and their audiences to apply their imaginations to grand new projects.