Tishan Hsu at Empty Gallery

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Videodrome's image of the man sinking into a television screen, along with its tagline "Long live the new flesh," were two perfect nuggets all but eclipsing the film itself - which I can barely remember. But recall the movie magic: image, pure ethereal surface, desire, that could was given reality, body, skin. The practical SFX perfected the transubstantiation. It tapped some unconscious cultural anxiety to give body to what was only presented to us abstractly, remotely, a televisual war that didn't actually take place. It's an old horror story- our dreams, manifested, bring actual nightmares. This is what we deep down know, why it's such successful plot trope, our desires are craven, you manifest the flesh on the screen and in reality you receive a really annoying supermodel. 

Danh Vo at White Cube

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Vo, the interminable and loved symbolist, coming out of Gober into literalness. Whereas Gober invented his own icons self-filled - plumbing metaphors - Vo compositionalizes pre-existing signs to move them around in space. Sculpture becomes words, texts of an affectual sign space, so the curators can write their own on the wall. Bones ascended alongside Jesus into the higher plane extinction.

See too: Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey

Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

(Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee)

Not to mention the infiltration of certain forms of cultural capital into emerging markets.

The opacity of Levine’s practice, what at first seemed political eventually dispersing to the desire clouding their surface, the first photo cancelling Levine’s second, leaving it as fetish, its surface, an erotic act of medium. Krauss writing it’s “act of theft, which takes place, so to speak, in front of the surface of Weston’s print” made it impossible to see hers, and others theorized the feeling of third sets of eyes, implying a form of moral stakes in which the viewer really was birthed in a consciousness that signaled the end of edenic ignorance. Levine eventually ditching the overt specificity of appropriation proper, and began rendering unplaceable genericisms and monochromes under the burnish of banal surface, a less cruel and more seductive version of Mosset monochromes, whose destruction of content made their opaqueness a violence, and more like commodity forms, whose reproduction was their content and total-allure of surface their meaning.