Tino Sehgal at Palais de Tokyo

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There's been some phenomenal take-downs of Sehgal. From Benhamin Meyer-Krahmer's comparison of Sehgal to Paris Hilton in TzK or Scanlan's to the Music Man in Artforum. Both unfortunately unavailable online. Both wildly lucid and entirely written with the same tongue-in-cheek smile and slightly exasperated understanding that, despite their overwhelmingly negativity towards it, provide the most incisive compelling explanation of it free of the jargon usually accumulating in stacks as the columns that herald them, the artists. It is perhaps the trait of the negative review that the author wishes to be understood, as opposed to the masses of words which however useless semantically already denote the crown.

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The radicality of Sehgal's practice softens as it finds ways around its ascetic limitations, as it is documented by onlookers, as it sells itself to museums, as images on CAD.

“Your Memories Are Our Future” at Palais de Tokyo

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As art furthers its occult investment in the auras and mechanisms of technologies and industry, it makes sense to hold its seances to the technocratic in the sites that create it.

Hiroshi Sugimoto at Palais de Tokyo



Of all the left hand early-to-mid-career turns made, Sugimoto’s left turns 360 degree shitty whipping donuts around as though he could walk away from it all. Trading in all that delectably precious gelatinous silver for brown burlap what? compared to Pace’s tesla coil science-fair (wasn’t even really that big of a tesla coil) got nothing on this. Here an artist who could have lived off his silver screens forever, predicated on its embalm’s impressiveness. but instead apocalyptic mis-en-scene with Anselm Kiefer levels of extentialist post-theshit-nostalgia. Look in this window to see a fake naked lady on a real silk couch. These hay-ride theatrics becoming ubiquitous. The return to theater. Destruction fetishism. Radioactive history. But artistic desire to look at the present with the lens of the post, it ends up coming across as solipsistic, needy. If we’re going to continue with these haunted hay-rides we could at least remember Sturtevant actually made an actual House-of-Horrors amusement ride.