Sam Falls at moCa Cleveland

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"You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. ... Abstraction is the inkblot that acts like silver, that acts like mirrors, to place whatever you want to see in it. And we keep digging mirrors. 

"The point is, the production is product. The machine you create to create. This replaces meaning. The machine does. No one knows why Pollock dripped anymore, that knowledge is lost. What is important is that he created a machine that dripped. 

"The industrialization of aura through reference-shredded-process." "You put the referent forest in the shredder to make a puzzle appear. Which looks like a painting. Gives the PR something to talk about."

"And so they are like sunsets, both the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident, cliche. Incidental returns of arbitrary conditions, completely unique and endlessly the same. A triple-point of beauty, arbitrariness, non-meaning. And perhaps meaning, our affection for the blushes, only appears as ward against inversion: If even one stupid sunset doesn't matter, nothing matters. Our fear."

"...any sufficiently complex sidewalk is indistinguishable from art."

"PeaRoeFoam"

A candle that smells like rain. A wine that remembers its year, can taste the vintage, the sticks, the horse shit. Not non-objective, just non-objectionable, the highest object of art today. 

FRONT Triennial

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Bigness itself qualifies press, attention, views. And so we invent fairs, biennials, whatever things stand in for bright neon of Artworld's next Las Vegas in new lands to hopefully Luxor hotel their place on the map. Beam me up, spot the fish to bite. Or something along those lines. I wonder what the rate for click through for all the images is, though there's not even that many here for an exhibition across 30 locations and and multiple cities. The exhibition's CAD Tags are longer than the Press Release. It should be noted CAD has an amazing amount of data on its hands, probably valuable, saleable, data. But maybe it's just depressing data. The amount of time spent on images in fractions of seconds, the amount of images even looked at listed in single digits. When someone clicks through to an exhibition, what do you think is the average number of images actually clicked through? Supplying the entirety doesn't matter, just the cream to be skimmed. There's 111 artists listed in the exhibition pamphlet, only 72 tagged here, and about 80 images. Ouch.

Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station

(Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station)

Surrealism at best estranged the world in a way that its signs were able to express something latent within it, at worst it was an attempt to make art more interesting than the world by disregarding its rules and positing the makers own. “The surrealist claims his dream world as more interesting than your dull nasty everyday one...”as Reinhardt theorized it. It was a debate between Adorno and Benjamin, whether the juxtaposition of contradictions could actually reveal something about them, or further obfuscate a world already slipping under fog.  Marx’s ironic use of the fantastic, vampires and werewolves, mocked the superstitions of capital’s veil. Ranciere, “On the other hand,” thought, “the work which builds understanding and dissolves appearances kills, by so doing, the strangeness of the resistant appearance that attests to the non-necessary or intolerable character of a world.”
And today we have weights shining behind tempura-fried flowers and a press release stating that it’s “analyiz[ing] the acceptance of what it means to be human,” the acceptance seeming finally having stopped, given up, to smell roses, push up daisies, an exhibition called Death.

See too: "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner , Group Show at Bortolami