Kiki Smith at Krakow Witkin Gallery

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Kiki Smith used to be an oddball. Her figurative allegorical fit askew into a more cerebral artworld. Like a wolf girl in high society. (As evidence of her outsider, for a career spanning decades this is only her 3rd exhibition featured on CAD.) That was then. This is now good measure to how far we've come. Smith looks like art today, the edge is removed. Would the Gilmore Girls scene work as well now witchiness is basic and wolf girls are welcomed with litter boxes. Mycelium network memes spread onto t-shirts. Being birthed by a woodland furry isn't unheard of. The suburbs are full of allegory.

Frances Stark at Museum of Fine Arts Boston

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Stark's, like Lecky's, a shared concern with the bedroom posters of adolescent coolness, the affective strategy of marketing that often form subjectivity under. And each poster/film a new and effective marketing strategy of coolness, the exhausting inventiveness of the painfully cool, picasso of teenage cool. Cool of any merit expressed with vulnerability: the manufactured cool of Vanilla Ice has nothing on the supreme empathetic but-also-if-not-manufactured-at-least-laying-the-blueprint-for-its-future-pruduction-line cool of, say, K Cobain. But, the point being Stark's cool is a self-manufactured, small business production. They're her own bedroom posters, rather than those of a post-Leckyian sort willing to post those they grew under as some cultural "criticism." Pay attention because even though its exhausting its an outline of escape from that, subjectivity can conform to the vessel without losing its shape, or so Stark would wager.

Past: "[Stark's] a gesture towards admitting the cultural disposability of an art practice of images today that stands over the face of the Deep, Instagram, that Artists can’t get over, blasted in an unstoppable deluge of culture daily. With so many “dealing with it,” detourning it into art  (as if that was meaningful) launching conventional artist weapons in atomized age, Stark’s insistence in the form's cheapness itself, its mixtape assemblage of a disposable music video, affirms her as one of the few who actually get it." Click: Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz


See too: Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz