Amalia Ulman at Jenny's

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"The theater that came next placed their social capital literally on view, staged, showcasing the finer patrons on a pedestal and brightly lit to be gawked upon. It would be called a Blue Ocean Strategy... Whatever institutional critique it held was mostly in the fact that it could do it better, insinuate itself better, prove the sporting of it, point dull yellow lights at the gameroom of it."

This is how you get corrupted. Eventually you get intertwined, which is the same as ensnared, because you know these people. Your opinion is no longer neutral, you bite your tongue, you become a compromised asset. There's nothing New Yorkers love more than self-congratulations. They and movie industry making self-congratulations an unironic artform. This is Empire and its state of mind. Do I fear other's toes? - that's what no one was asking. It's fun to be part of something. The toast and the roast are the same to the professional. It's barely caricature at this point. Robbin's Talent was funny because it wasn't a joke. It dryly announced its commercial moment, no art to it at all. Artists as their headshot. Artist as professional. This was before "Top 10 Under 30"s. It was saying the quiet part loud. Here the caricature is alms paid to deny the horse of it all. Barely caricature at all. 

"A culture, say a magazine or a museum, that can purchase an absolution to the images it wants through an art that gesticulates critique."

See too: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff at Cabinet, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

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From the first lightning bolts of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills: the artworld continuously electrified by depictions of women in societal bondage gear. Artists depicting the strictures that force women to conform to cultural mores; images of women made, if only momentarily, powerless or complicit, which whose artistic doubling, or performance of, is the critique. (And as these mores and roles mutate in time so too the art updates alongside the new chain.) And despite the critical intention's now obvious powerlessness to successfully confront or diminish such roles - as evidenced by its 40 years of continuous updating and still ringing true - Sherman et al. enjoy success in the market, press, and critical etceteras. (Successful critique would ostensibly outmode itself to that culture?) A success slightly ominous in comparison to the seeming lack of success of practices and images depicting women that oppose dominant hierarchies or act to provide fertile turf outside it, say A.L. Steiner. A culture, say a magazine or a museum, that can purchase an absolution to the images it wants through an art that gesticulates critique. But that its success is simply a culture that likes seeing - culturally approved - women in bondage.