Ugo Rondinone at The Green Gallery

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Ugo Rondinone makes stupid work whose stupidity doesn't matter. That may be because he's Swiss and  the Swiss have a knack for stupidity, one that auto-destructs, abuses time, or is John Armleder. Swiss stupidity accepts a mechanistic uselessness. (Is it antidote to fine watches, knives?) It would seem joyless if it didn't build such elaborate contraptions for its own touched smile. The antecedents here of Ellsworth Kelly meets Yves Klein is a red herring to the main point of Rondinone turning stupidity back to its roots: flowers, bright colored whatevers made to attracts insects. It works. 

Michelle Grabner at The Green Gallery

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In Ken Johnson's now infamous review of Grabner's Cohan exhibition - inspiring dozens of site's posts to just contextualize and organize the increasing spiral of commentary and LttE and responses and blog posts that themselves further contextualized and organized, excerpted in full and commented with ever lengthening comment sections growing atop still warm bodies until you had this like eco-production-system of sites that spiral out, far as you would like to go, into cold and nervous chattering all based around the whale fall of one small dead review and which now us too still sucking off the carcass - was, as is often the case with negative reviews, spot on in everything but valuation, Grabner's work might be "comfortable" "middle class" work from a "tenured" "soccer mom" that allude to nothing more than the "bland" "unexamined sociological background" from which they spring, that's exactly why they're so good.