Sam McKinniss at JTT

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People hate McKinniss, possibly be the most polemical painter not being spanked for absurd auction digits. The hate against McKinniss's hamsters seems incommensurate. But maybe his continual painting of hamsters, or making hamsters of his subjects, that cloying adorbz of the neotenic focus-group-tested rodent/celebrity, is what drives the want to wring the necks of those oh so vulnerable and useless. Everyone so cute, loved, like the adored really needed a court painter. How rare that McKinniss paints someone that isn't massively completely almost annoyingly loved.

The point being, at some point, desire itself became "critical." Your teenage bedroom becomes a "site," a "presupposition" of "critical vanity," the art terms attach easily. Putting cultural touchstones on display you obviously vampire their cultural relation if not their capital, forming a portrait of culture through its blood. Consumption becomes a form of value. Relation has value. And post-kitsch understands that no amount of kitsch is not recuperable by artistic "criticality." The invisible framing of art does that. The way On Kawara paints "9 JAN.1973" McKinniss paints a more adorned version, pointing to Prince or JTT, whatever celebrity moment, the cultural object is a signifier, a blank date hung on its readymade coatrack with an affect of cultural valorization: painting, the embellishing act that makes them proper in the silver gilt halls of art. The act could seem redundant to celebrity itself or simply inevitable. Your becoming a heavily trained marker of culture.

Anna-Sophie Berger at JTT

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Berger's exhibitions look like group shows, filled to the brim with objects inconsistent. If outward appearance needs consistency to "make sense," if fashion is meant as an expression of its subject, the wearer, we could draw a line from Berger's fashion discourses earlier to now: a breakdown in objects ability to communicate its subject, artist or wearer - the artistic object itself sediments its subject as an appearance - in Berger's denial of "sameness over time" - or pretty much any artistic "signature" - that thing that undergirds identity, instead the river carves new course with each exhibition amassed to the brim with disconnection and forcing a sort of refusal of the usual sense, resist the easy corralling that similarity would invoke, a person of many fabrics.


See too: Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins, Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

Urs Fischer at JTT

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Interactive art, of which this is, like Web 2.0's flourishing predicated on the 2006's person of the year, You, the system shifts from content generation to interactivity itself, turning itself into interface for the user themselves to self produce, the turnkey-op entrepreneurial dream, in which as long as the structure is up and running "content-revenue" will self-generate, perfect museum lobby bait fulfilling two functions in programs whose "outreach" have kids painting in the style of those artist to see themselves as, mimicking the corporate strategies as a manic oversized art-as-cartoon-absurdity version constructing a real crowdpleaser if there ever was one, because like Scanlan on Sehgal, even mediocrity is acceptable to a public so long as it has a hand in it.