The appearance of a new biannual art magazine, Paper Monument, published in part by the editors of the relatively new biannual literary magazine n+1, prompts all sorts of reflections: on the history of modernism (brief, but heady); on The Function Of Criticism At The Present Time (I know, I know, you’ll answer after you finish uploading a video of yourself dancing naked in your dorm room); on the fate of the avant-garde (don’t ask). But most of all the advent of a brash new journal of the art raises an important question: Are there any important questions left to raise? I mean the old questions, the ones about the role of the artist in society, about the relationship of art to money, about the seeming paradox of middle-class receptiveness to anti-middle-class art; about the question of artistic form when all artistic forms seem to be exhausted. Add to that new, and unanswerable, questions about the status of art at a time when the borders of truth seem to be blurring in art and life — from Jame Frey to Jayson Blair to lonelygirl15; when the mind-bogglingly accelerated technology of entertainment often leaves the imagination stunned and passive; when the passive imagination is giving way to the assertive ego, which has to get involved in every artistic occasion that comes its way — from popular to high — as voter, mash-up artist, or garrulously commenting blogger.

In all this shifting, incoherent, disheartening, and (maybe) inspiring mess, the avant-garde artist — or bohemian, or adversial, or simply honest and committed artist — can’t rely on the traditional, as it were, tactic of anti-traditional agitation against the status quo. The decadents, the Fauves, the dandies, the Bloomsbury aesthetes, the Dadaists, the Black Mountain crowd, the Beats — they were all several steps ahead of the official culture. They were avant, after all. But nowadays, just standing still, and seeing, and thinking, is a revolutionary gesture. Being avant is for software companies, cellphone manufacturers, and Citibank ads. The great thing about Paper Monument — and about n+1 at its best, for that matter — is the emphasis both magazines put on seeing and thinking clearly and trying not to get caught up in the general, dizzying whirl, which accommodates, appropriates, and assimilates anything within its force field. If there’s a not-so-hidden drama to both magazines, it’s the triple motion coursing through them. The editors want conscientiously to stay true to themselves — what an old-fashioned notion! — they ambitiously want the fame and success that all artists want, and they know with a kind of helpless cunning, and an instinctive coquettishness, that even as they scorn, protest, criticize, excoriate, and mock the voracious System, the voracious System has an admiring eye on their wildest, most resourceful opposition.

So the idea is to play it cool, not show all your cards, write subtly, allusively, delicately, so as to avoid upsetting the careful balance of your triple consciousness. You can’t let anyone pin you down, label you, associate you too closely with any belief or idea — or as we say now, with any “position.” If you do, you risk two antithetical dangers. You might get appropriated. That’s the first danger. The second is that you might alienate prospective appropriators.

Paper Monuments’ statement, “From the Editors,” has just the right amount of obliqueness, barely perceptible irony, and precocious worldliness: “The subversive luxury item, like the unicorn, was to be found exclusively in carefully worded written accounts.” That’s nice, and provocative — I almost know what it means. And just when the editors’ statement threatens to tip into pretentious avantness, they take a step back, turn worldly, down-to-earth, funny and hard: “We can’t count the number of times we thought we were talking philosophy, only to find out later we had taken part in a very subtle business meeting.” But they are afraid of the business meeting, too. They kind of want to be there. Yet once there, you feel that, out of inherited bohemian shame, they’d want to start immediately talking about philosophy.

They are appropriately weary about the art market, but they don’t want to appear bitter in their slightly expressed exasperation. Writing about the present as though it were the Thermidor-jettisoned past, they confide, with a shrewd use of the exclamation mark like a guarantor of youthful innocence: “We loved he market! Everything came from the boom. We worked ewer hours. Some of us had a lot of money, and the rest of us were full of hope.” They are not bitter Underground Men, they want you to know, and if you come across a healthy sprinkling of “f—“s in their pages, along with mutterings about “real-estate speculation” and “the physical and socioeconomic restrictions of the grid plan,” it’s not for lack of doing well.

But you can be full of scorn for something that hasn’t scorned you. You feel that part of the editors’ frustration is that they can’t help getting some of their self-definition from the System they wish to redefine. For them, mordant exasperation equals setback and disappointment. But they don’t want to think like that! Even Paper Monument’s insistent use of the word “hope” struggles against a guilty conscience, as if the editors know somewhere, deep down, that hope is a synonym for “opportunity,” and they don’t want to be caught coveting money, rather than more respectably just simply having, through no fault or sinister desire of their own (a lot of) it.

All this tension is a good, honest, and refreshing revelation of where a young artist, writer, or intellectual stands today, if he is conscientious enough to want to take stock. He stands everywhere and nowhere. The magazine itself unfolds along similarly blurry, wavering lines. Its tone shifts from fine, scrupulous ironies, expressed with an almost Edwardian decorum (“Was it their humor or their seriousness that was so unmistakably German?”), to satisfyingly alienating academicese (“Gaining notoriety is a strangely atelic activity”), to discordant Yiddish locutions and words from another era (“What could be bad?”; “She Say Breck, I Say Dreck”) to raw, vigorous, right-on-the-money prose: “Rock and roll is a music of mechanized sexuality. That’s why ninety percent of it sounds like clocks f—ing” (J. D Daniels, in “Clocking Out”).

The magazine’s two editors — Dushko Petrovich and Roger White — both have long essays. The former’s piece on the German artist Neo Rauch is quietly brilliant — Mr. Petrovich has a beautiful, promising, and uncorrupted mind. Mr. White’s essay on the master copyist, Andre Pretorius, is itself masterful, elegant, polished, and somewhat boring and inconsequential. It really begged to be read while either commuting or vacating. The issue’s three reviews are also unremittingly intelligent, fastidious, and judicious. They recall Eliot’s famous advice to critics: “There is no method except to be very intelligent.” But shaking things up, bringing new perceptions into the world, has little to do with intelligence. And what passes for “intelligence” is often tired insights encrusted on conventional prejudices. Eliot’s own criticism is hardly “intelligent.” It is, like all original mental experiences, pre- or post-intelligence.

But being smart is better than being dumb, and I’ll read Paper Monument as it appears, as much for its moments of pre- and post-intelligence (it has them) as for its determination to stand still — or at least to stand still until something irresistible comes along, anyway. I wish Paper Monument the torments, joys, and unforeseen consequences of explicit loves and hates. (How about an entire issue devoted to parodying the most prominent art critics of the day? They could call it “Impasto Puttanesca.”) And may the triple consciousness let up a little. And, please, not a word about the truer values of Leland Bell.

Mr. Siegel is a senior editor at the New Republic and the author, most recently, of “Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television.” His “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob” will be published in January.