Climate Change Has Already Transformed Everything About Contemporary Art

In New York 2140 (2017), sci-fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson imagines cultural life in a city changed by the warming climate. Rising seas have flooded this future Gotham, transforming much of the five boroughs into an intertidal zone. The two great “pulses” that inundated downtown Manhattan and other low-lying areas had catastrophic effects on citizens of the former financial capital. The tides also ushered in a thriving, anarchic aqua-urbanism.
The former commercial gallery distric