AS A STUDENT OF MODERNISM in the 1980s and ’90s, I was taught that the genre of manifesto literature, rich in declarative sentences and visionary ambitions, had petered out before my time; I was reading great prose in a dead language. Then came 1996, and Manifesta. Cleverly feminized, corporatized, and maybe pluralized, “Manifesta” as a title revived a modernist keyword—an emblem of the collective and rebellious—while acknowledging the institutionalization of a modernist ethos in contemporary times. “You will not find paintings or monumental sculptures. You will not see a traditional