Ulysses Jenkins at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

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We're not meant to see these photos. Which explains their useless. (I mean the above image is a photo of a halo, not art.) They're meant for editorial, press photos, meant to accompany some review, to supplement what has become The Museum's online cavalcade of docents, saltzes, cheerleaders. Ostensibly me. Weirdly hard to view the work, and now words to stand in for; the foregrounding to replace ground. It's a strange turn for art. Reviews have become the information broadcast mechanism of the museum, its education wings. Which begins to eclipse the work itself: an artwork covered in newspaper clippings about itself. "We are just a mass of images you've gotten to know."

Tishan Hsu at Hammer Museum

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Obvious forebear and yet something else entirely; today's surrealist melting icons are kept distinctly separate from our biomorphic goop. Hsu's technology acquires a bulge; the inanimate congeal a Cronenbergian "new flesh." For years smartphones pressed to be seamless, this was the pinnacle of technologic interface, to lack the orifice that Hsu keeps pressing. A phone shouldn't look like it might drool, Instagram icons shouldn't look like a dank bathroom. Like Thek, or Lynch, the campiness is part of the grotesque. You take your phone away from face, a smear of your human grease marring its perfect black pool. We don't like our tech to feel like us. The more we interact with it, the more it becomes us, the most we want it not resemble us.

“Stories of Almost Everyone” at Hammer Museum

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The hammer opening a box. You likely have seen the video of Ferrell and his windblown partner comedically "not getting art." Sanctioned by the Hammer, Ferrell and everyone involved operating pro bono, Ferrell’s wife on the Board, an advertisement that was embraced and spread, and perhaps something to do with its appearance on CAD now.

In it the Ferrell mocks the art which he of course sees - at least a little - as mocking him. The comedy alleviates the tension of and fear of conceptual art - fear whose expression runs the spectrum from “just not getting it” or incanting “the emperor's new clothes” against it. The film does little in the way of traditional education even when glaringly obvious: Ferrell's explication of the pillow slept on by acrobats is exactly the point, to create a story like a dream inside your own pilloried head. This goes unremarked. Instead the advert supplants traditional education for an implicit training: how to feel okay in museums by arming potential visitors with a weapon against artworks: irreverence, jadedness, mockery, that interminable arms race of cool we all learned in grade school by proving who could care least. The Hammer’s spectacle almost begging people to feel okay mocking art. That we now feel the need to educate people in artistic insouciance is a symptom of how badly the artworld had arranged itself toward the opposite: decades guiding the public toward veneration and supplication toward it. Now needing to explain to people you can make fun of art, condoning it. That art and more specifically contemporary art museums have become synonymous with entertainment, younger people finding themselves gravitating to MoMA rather than the Met, the Hammer has made a decision to consciously align itself with this new audiential target, the young who are interested in art but have little or no education in it, and goes out of its way to cater to this audience by claiming a stance against the education priorly requisite. This makes sense. Even the Met is opening contemporary wings. The outreach seems sensible. Ah to be mocked by a famous comedian! what success, to be patronized by a movie star playing the everyman. “Stories of Almost Everyone”

Avery Singer at Hammer Museum

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Money and value are often conflated, as institutional credence incommensurate with aesthetic interest, on which Singer's meteoric rise could be conspiratorially stated, that sometimes automations in markets encounter feedback loops of marked signals and values exponentiate. This is to say let's not yet make much of the rise. Singer's paintings are fine, just fine, their biggest asset, perfect productions - obvious in hindsight and brilliantly able to recoup near any critique as symptoms of the increasingly digital world they represent safely - expressions of 2012's much talked about "New Aesthetic" documenting "the increasing appearances of latent digital mechanisms within the real world" which is here the google freeware (created to model and represent 3-D space) painted as representations (become representations of our digital representations then) and which Singer's painting do represent well, that particular weight digital objects hold entirely in their surface and the weight of rendered light they are, after all, realist. Again it's that reptilian pleasure of seeing something painted, rendered, we get representation back but now with the value added of a moral (which the institutional artworld secretly loves, gives reason to text), cautionary tales of spooky new digital take over as dutch still lifes, vanities, memento moris of everything beautiful mechanized and produced, even the artists and art, which we know but now they get to tell us.


See too: Jonas Wood at David Kordansky, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium