On the New

In The You On AI Encyclopedia

The significance of On the New for the AI moment is that it arrived with its conclusions already drawn. Groys was not writing about machines. He was writing about Marcel Duchamp, about readymades, about the institutional mechanisms through which a urinal from a Fifth Avenue plumbing supply shop became one of the most consequential artworks of the twentieth century. The urinal contained no creativity. The gallery contained the archive. The crossing produced the new. And the same structural operation, Groys argues, governs every subsequent instance of what a culture recognizes as novelty — including the outputs of large language models.

The book's second move is even more consequential. If novelty is relational, then scarcity of novelty depends on scarcity of production. For most of cultural history, the rate at which candidates could be generated for inclusion in the archive was limited by the rate at which humans could make things. Curators, critics, and editors evaluated candidates because the candidates arrived at a manageable pace. AI abolishes this scarcity. When a single prompter can generate thousands of texts in a day, each technically differing from what the archive contains, the concept of the new begins to lose its discriminating power — not because novelty has ceased to exist, but because the institutional machinery that distinguished it from redundancy has been overwhelmed.

Groys's analysis therefore predicts the exact crisis the AI economy has produced: the repricing of value away from production and toward curation. The 2026 SaaSpocalypse, the decline of executional labor, the new premium on judgment — all of it is legible within the framework On the New established three decades earlier. The book is not about technology. It is about the institutional logic that technology has now universalized.

The irony of On the New is that its most important readers arrived thirty years late. When it was published, it was read as art theory for specialists. In 2026, it reads as the operating manual for the cultural economy AI has produced.

Origin

Groys wrote On the New while teaching in Germany after his 1981 emigration from the Soviet Union. The book synthesized his engagement with the Moscow Conceptualists, his immersion in Western art theory, and his training in philosophy and mathematics into a single analytical framework. The long delay before its English translation — twenty-two years — reflected both the difficulty of the prose and the resistance of Anglo-American art theory to its central claim: that Romantic creativity was a myth that had always been sustained by the institutions it purported to transcend.

Key Ideas

Revaluation, not creation. Innovation is the movement of an object across the boundary between the profane and the culturally valued, not the production of something from nothing.

The archive is the measure. What counts as new depends entirely on what the archive already contains, which means novelty is institutionally constituted rather than intrinsically present.

Scarcity enables valuation. The machinery that distinguishes the new from the redundant operated under assumptions of limited production that AI has rendered obsolete.

Novelty migrates under abundance. When everything can be produced, the new moves from the object to the frame — from the making to the selecting, contextualizing, and valuing.