Luchita Hurtado at Hauser & Wirth

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The blue chip gallery unearthed a resurgent dead artists' pleasant and inoffensive abstraction? The trope is a cliche beyond. And the metaphor here is overpowering. You can say "I am" so long as it is in the vernacular of the institutions in power, so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper, into gentle background, affirmative noise for the collector. Hurtado might be a great painter and this is made moot by gallery. It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: "an artist you cannot speak english is no artist." But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter.

Trevor Shimizu at art hall

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It kinda sucks that Shimizu got better at painting. "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point." More accurately, "Heartbreaking: The Worst Artist You Know Just Made a Decent Painting." More more accurately, The bad-boy artist had gentrified his painting enough to make something pleasant, marketable. Tale as old as time. The wink-wink attitude of the early work which will eventually dissolve in time, leaving us with this gentle landscape abstraction. Pleasantry, from an artist with a "fart" series. This might be one of the farts. They might all be. The artist as orifice emitting Pantone colors of the year. Worst, it is better than most.