John Kelsey at Daniel Buchholz

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The behatted Kelsey's John Marinesque Watercolors prove Kelsey doesn't have anything to prove after decades romancing the artworld and sailing the echelons of cool across gallerist, artist, writer, fashionista etc. etc, finally expelling the exhaust of hyper aspiration where, like the mythic painted-in-secret still-life paintings of Clement Greenberg, the critic expended relaxes into the comfort of Sunday painting. The cash-in could be eyerolling but the watercolors are endearing in the attention to the body exhausting itself, fights are exhausting, which you can't but think now too of Kelsey - pretty much on his own death-bed of cool - reflecting his own exhaustion and while the legs arms often turn to overcooked elbow noodles, the determination to capture the body is present; the whale stuff, while coy, is shit.

Bernadette Corporation at Stedelijk Museum

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You'll have zero idea what's going on here if you don't already know the projects, though you can make a guess. BC's absorption of fashion-means (not necessarily the clothes as McGuffin that they are) can't really be under-stressed. Launching a hundred like-minded careers since, BC weren't the first of the fashion-orient but their understanding its "based on mythmaking and seduction" opened the eyes of today's Genzkenites to the aura preceding their deluge of material whateverness. Brand was the powerforce of the artist, and confusion, misalignment and just stuff could dissolve objects to the narrative-sans-critque, seen performed in the phenoms of today everyone from Arakawa and Bratsch to half the surround-audience gen and trickling into some of the post-krebberites' conceptual horsing. Much of BC's project was pointed despite its intended then dispersion that now in exhibition looks like the miasma of the younger's extraction of it.


See too: Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni