Jim Shaw at New Museum

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200 million images are uploaded to Facebook everyday, another 60 million to Instagram daily. Shaw's investment in good old artisanal, traditionally constructed images could seem asinine in comparison to the endlessly juxtapozing and surreal mass Instagram feed journaling the dreams of the slumbering. It has been argued before that both premade tubes of paint and photography's invention each radically shifted the ground of painting, and so the disposability of images now must too be having radical repercussions, and so it's hard to tell if Shaw is a relic or a seer, but it looks pretty good right now.


see too: Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich

Albert Oehlen at New Museum

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Reviews of Oehlen's throw a lot of adjectives; as if adjectives themselves could make good on the pact of a reviewer's positivity. While Oehlen's paintings are adjective heavy, full of attributes and modifiers, this seems to miss the point that the adjectives of Oehlen's painting generally are interesting only in their distance from their general use in painting.  Tangled, virtuosic, derelict, elegant, ironic, jazzed, these schmaltzyest of painting's descriptors match Oehlen only in an askew perverted means, a knight's move, the longest way to it. When called "the most resourceful painter alive" the interest is in the way resourceful becomes an ironic term of painting, Oehlen's "resourcefulness" is less a clever solution than a brutal overcoming, Oehlen isn't much resourceful at all.
Oehlen proved you could have critical-punk and painting too, without the meta-games of Kippenbergeresque politic, that you could fiercely champion painting without quotes around it and not be shown the door. Schjeldahl is right to point out that this may leave us in the realm of painting as formal jazz, a cloistered relevance, and the second generation of Oehlenist abstraction currently flooding markets -which seem content with careers extrapolated from single ticks of their father's - might bolster the point, but there is something humanist about hanging one's face out the window and really letting it hit you.

And so see too: Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt

Chris Ofili at New Museum

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Ofili always was a decorator, and the neo-nouveau finds itself welcome as decor to a museum in need of something to look at, and all images David Zwirner's courtesy.  The museum stirs publicity from a press able to create mass visibility convertible into admissions sedimenting as prestige and hopefully donors, from work rented out (“lent”) by the commercial powerhouse hoping to leap economic strata with the museum’s imbued validation read by collectors as investment’s mark of approval, a stamp of permanence that is the museologic myth the museum implicitly condones.
Look at that sculpture.
Like CAD, the museum is a visibility box containing a machine working to control the attention of an audience cultivated as willing to accept its voice, which attention then able to be exchanged for other forms of capital. The expanded field of cultural production.  The writer exchanges his proof of extended attention by the culturally accredited, the writer hopes not to fuck it up, parasiting off the attention turned, to draw attention to oneself. This text wishes to extract your attention in in hopes of future exchange. The museum becomes a gatekeeper of history, of history’s image, of visibility sedimented, a lineage which reinscribes its power as objective, and exhibits a beautiful show.