Bradley Kronz at Friart

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Craftsperson of the wasteland would seem a timely moniker as the gallery becomes the cargo-cult reliquary of our cultural wasteland. i.e. Place the coke bottle in the gallery, watch it attract aura type-of-art. (See too: Why do group shows always looks like you blew up a shopping mall?) But Kronz missed the memo on letting the whitecube do the work - instead putting all this sweat into his own personal orgone accumulators, all hands toward wasteland contraptions for... framing? Big question mark there. But frames were the original aura accumulators and I think Kronz is all about trying to build a frame from the standpoint of someone who has never seen but had read about them before the endtimes. 

See too: Bradley Kronz at Lars Friedrich, “Breathing Through Skin” at Antenna Space

Hamishi Farah at Fri Art

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Pusha T and Drake's longstanding beef ended with Drake having to release a statement admitting, yes, he was hiding a child and, yes, that was him in blackface. It exploded. People said Pusha took it too far. Drake vocally conceding the beef would have been less of an L than his hand forced in apology.  Beef was supposed to remain in the land of publicity grabbing headlines, in hyperreality, in the game. I.e. Children, etc., shouldn't be involved. Farah's own "going nuclear" would also involve children that should maybe be left out of the game's foibles. Do you see where this is going? For those seeking beef's reportage: After Schutz excused her razzle dazzled murdered black child through her relation as a mother, Farrah, no stranger to surgical summer, painted Schutz's child. It exploded. Farah's painting of the child was censored in Monopol, labeled an "act of revenge" (language seemingly no German paper used to describe Schutz's painting of someone else's child.) The jujitsu here is black belt. Returning all the stakes of painting - that artists are quick to claim in the same breath they claim to be outside of - into the real. The virtual sacrosanct of poised conceptuality - "in the game" of hyperreality - Farah is all too canny in, happy to, throw into the artistically hot water it supposedly was already boiling. Basically, if you want stakes in art, here are your stakes. This is isn't conceptual, these are people's lives, not necessarily all in the game. Not a game. Farah, reasonably, has beef. And there is more of it. His instagram, @merlincarpenter, documents another beef with none other than. Carpenter's once conceptually excused racist joke, that he seemingly would prefer to disappear, Farah continuously drags back into the mud of the real. 

Choosing a side in a beef is always part of the fun. And your choice here is going come with political questions on the limits of art's unquestioned terrain, stakes, Debord, and how much hyper faux reality we can take from rappers. But I fucking hate Drake.

Gene Beery at Fri Art

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"Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot. The handcrafted simplicity creating a directness of intention that art is forbidden. Artists' private esteem for the simple, functional object. These objects against which art feels inconsequential, inadequate against an elemental usefulness."

Beery toys with this functionality, a slight haywire version sparking in the walls, threatening to burn the whole thing, meaning, down. The trueness of statements, their ability to make sense, becomes if not beside the point, a thing to torture. Not the treachery of images, but the treachery of saying anything at all.