Sunday, January 17, 2016

Avery Singer at Hammer Museum

Avery Singer at Hammer Museum
(link)

Money and value are often conflated, as institutional credence incommensurate with aesthetic interest, on which Singer's meteoric rise could be conspiratorially stated, that sometimes automations in markets encounter feedback loops of marked signals and values exponentiate. This is to say let's not yet make much of the rise. Singer's paintings are fine, just fine, their biggest asset, perfect productions - obvious in hindsight and brilliantly able to recoup near any critique as symptoms of the increasingly digital world they represent safely - expressions of 2012's much talked about "New Aesthetic" documenting "the increasing appearances of latent digital mechanisms within the real world" which is here the google freeware (created to model and represent 3-D space) painted as representations (become representations of our digital representations then) and which Singer's painting do represent well, that particular weight digital objects hold entirely in their surface and the weight of rendered light they are, after all, realist. Again it's that reptilian pleasure of seeing something painted, rendered, we get representation back but now with the value added of a moral (which the institutional artworld secretly loves, gives reason to text), cautionary tales of spooky new digital take over as dutch still lifes, vanities, memento moris of everything beautiful mechanized and produced, even the artists and art, which we know but now they get to tell us.


See too: Jonas Wood at David KordanskyBrian Calvin at Le Consortium