John Miller at Schinkel Pavillon

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"Veblen asserted that what so often passes for beauty is simply demonstrable wealth; our sense of an article’s superiority corresponds to its honorific wastefulness. Extravagance, the capacity to waste, signifies power. To the extent that waste implies a superabundance of wealth, and because power is measured in material acquisitions, the beauty of an article confirms the prepotency of its owner.
After late capital became a retardative force, the standard of beauty, according to Veblen, served to inhibit technical, social, and artistic progress by driving a wedge between the useful and the desirable: 'The principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative principle'[...]
The hope of liberation in superior taste turned the dandy’s quest into a quixotic venture. In contrast, the post-Modern tropes of irony, quotation, and pastiche represent an attempt to reclaim beauty by negating its usual invidiousness. Yet this reclamation, like the dandy’s insolence, admits a painful gap between intentions and results, utopian longing and what ideology actually delivers. And so the promise of a better life lingers on in a highly mannered guise. Here the melancholic portents are unmistakable to anyone who cares to give them a closer look: it is the suppressed rage of those for whom beauty has been tainted forever. " - John Miller, Artforum

John Miller at Meliksetian | Briggs

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What was so flashy twinkling across televisual space is frozen as the wallpaper of painting and hideous: television zazzle becomes the bad struggle to taxidermy it. The Price is Right, running for over half a century, has done something right commanding midmorning viewers through a Vegas labyrinth watching guesses at the price of garbage, but Miller's focus on the chintz is as much an attack on painting as much as any politics of mass entertainment premised on the evaluation of commodities. This the point surely. Because the television game is no different from the majority of dealers and collectors also guessing the eventual price or status of the painting before you. The critic/viewer only plays into the game because the paintings are dead, and bodies assessing providing breaths for its life support. The transpositional point where glitz is equal to the stagnant monochromes.

John Miller at Barbara Weiss

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There's Yves Klein blue and John Miller brown, a color so untranscendent as to castrate any pretense of art's higher plane, reminding us of our earthly rope tethering bowels to earth. Log cabins, monk's robes, organic packaging, all reminding us of the earth, the shit that fertilizes us. Miller blockades, belittles, our azure sky fantasy with the lesser order, everything we would prefer to forget immortalized over what had been our vacations, from drudgery.


John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler

Richard Hoeck and John Miller at Meliksetian | Briggs

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The stupid comedy of our anthropomorphized figures meeting grizzly dismemberment cast down cliffs, their odd hollowness standing in for all the blood and guts that should be splattered. That we actually identify, sympathize, with them, these reflections we adorn our stores with. What use does a culture have for fake images of ourselves. The Doryphorous has a reason, an idealization, a mannequin, devoid of his saleables, none.


See too: Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel, John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler

John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

MILLER: Yeah, he’s very much into that. I think it’s just a generational difference, too. I know this from my students—they check out shows online all the time, they keep up with Contemporary Art Daily. So we might think, “Oh, this show was over there and this audience hasn’t seen it,” but younger artists, if they’re engaged, they’ve probably seen what’s available online. I always forget that because I’ve never gotten in the habit of looking at shows online. It’s just not something I do. But artists in their 20s and 30s are very much doing that.

WILLIAMS: I have to admit, I look at Contemporary Art Daily every morning. When I’m having coffee, I look at the New York Times and Contemporary Art Daily...

John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler

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The PR would have one believe its difficult apprehending a similarity to these two artists who really both seem to be keepers of the sewer. Miller's are the populist abject to Sittig's paint bile blowouts. Miller's mines the cultural detritus of things we would have sooner forgotten, how awfully the spectacle of game shows has spoiled and molded, Sittig draws out the sewage from the drain of abstraction, and expression gone wrong, both standing in the darkening mire of ugly culture, both about learning to love disgust.


See too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St. , Group Show at David Kordansky