Gay Outlaw, Helen Mirra, ﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠ at soda, Kyoto

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The question of "what does this mean?" is replaced with, "what am I looking at?" An ostensible glitch in the visibility production machine. The above - guessed to be an - Ian Rosen project gotten more baroque, a mutation, succeededon the demands of infection, the host CAD. Which is where our previous golf metaphor breaks down. The putt was sunk. Admittedly in today's news real success is transmission. (Sanchez et al.) There's very little to 'gram. Surely the point. Whereas it had been that sinking your art into good gallery placement was key to the laurels - something the Rosen project had been surely adept at - this is no longer the ultimate conditions of art. “what had been a process of legitimation, attributable to particular institutions or critical bodies, now becomes a process of simple visibility, attributable to the media apparatus itself.” Accreditation today looks more like JoshSmith/Kardashian spamming yourself into cultural consciousness. "Fame is only predicated on sight, not value: eventually a critical mass of people know you and then you are famous." If we're unsure what we're looking at the machine can't transmit. This where we're teed up for the art writers' questionable duty, to answer for the question, the point. But we renege. We're left holding a glitch, a hole. Containing a golf ball.

See too:  Ian Rosen, Nandi Loaf at King’s Leap, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

Ian Rosen at The Finley

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Rosen is to art what golf is to sport. Removing its physical aspects to magnify its mental stressors and fine muscle finesse of putting the ball in its proper hole with the least sweat. A methodical game for Rosen's name sunk in the proper places of art's social field. Both Rosen and golf minimize their respective sphere's entertainment value (athletics and objects) to find viewers caring more for the prosaic passing of scenery, i.e. that since there's nothing to see our interest turns elsewhere, and Rosen's finesse in making CAD his personal resume proves the course has, at least in some tournaments, been standardized. The greens on which Rosen sinks putts aren't that disparate, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer of the Finley provides in some way the map to Rosen's field, having co-curated with and exhibited at - the then co-gallery of - Kristina Kite; curated exhibitions at Midway Contemporary Art where too Bruce Hainley has curated and who has at least appeared several times on stage with L-G who thanked him firstly in her Lozano book; all of whom have worked with Rosen. The New Museum's First look series is the only unconnected green. Which makes you realize the course isn't that large.

Also this show was in February according the Finley's nice website (the only organization to list Rosen's exhibition on their website) and had this to say:

Ian Rosen's project took place online, replacing our website with this single image. Nothing was installed in the physical space of the gallery for the duration of the show, though the sidewalk marquee indicated the artist's name.
While it may seem non-referential and indecipherably oblique, Rosen's image is actually a direct reference and visual quote from the first exhibition at The Finley.

See too: Ian Rosen at Kristina Kite

Ian Rosen at Kristina Kite

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Presciently, Bruce Hainley understood early, eerily, the limitations of interest in Rosen’s work in a review based on a sole photograph in a single show when the artist was still working in physical space. Hainley muses on discerning acts of “grooming” from “genuine distress,” reaching out for “contact,” the review reads as sage advice/stern warning to the young artist more than addressing Artforum readers.
But despite Hainley’s parable to a young artist, we are today left with Rosen gathering artworld consecrators to be"pleased to announce [their] cooperation in the presentation of an exhibition." “Exhibition” now mere name listed: Hainley, Midway Contemporary Art, New Museum, now Kite; you’d be hard pressed to find a higher end roster. Its nihilistic critique asserting that names on a list are the real base of art, reductio ad absurdum. A game of gathering artworld credibility, that Hainley acknowledged his complicity with, in which you are a pawn with one distinct choice, of saying yes or no, but after that the moves are all already preloaded into Rosen’s game.
Like Codax, or Green Tea Gallery, it’s hard not to be cynical about its “institutional critique” - revealing the cred-network - as anything but press building, self-mythology.

Read Hainley's here.