How will the future look if we stop believing in the idea of progress? In this essay, I follow one work by the artist Tino Sehgal who famously raised critical and philosophical questions through his performative artworks. In 2009, his project “This Progress” occupied the entire space of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. For six weeks, the modern museum was emptied of objects and filled only with people having conversations as they walked up the famous rotunda leading from the entrance to the skylight at the top of the building. “This Progress” was composed of hundreds of ‘interpreters’ engaging thousands of visitors each day. The opening question, posed by a child approximately ten years old, was “can you tell me: what is progress?” The answer delineated the trajectory of the conversations with teenagers, young adults, and seniors replacing each other while leading the visitors upwards. The walk revealed the temporal structure of experience, with one axis moving forward, while another spirals inwards. I use this example to discuss the difference between modern and contemporary art and link artworks with the form of life of their times. I also discuss the relations between Habermas’ “public sphere” and the contemporary museum, elaborate on “the experiential turn,” and relate Wittgenstein’s “forms of life” to the experience of time and the work of art.