Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger

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For a brief moment Brodmann almost went tasteful-  but, looking at these one would assume we are back to having fun. They are irreverent, cartoon, colorful. And yet ...  they're about as fun as farts, or watching someone paint one. Which pretty sure this is. A fart. Last time a butthole was implanted into someone's forehead. Today, disgusting green gas. 

See too: "Everyone loves the smell of their own brand, and the miasmia of this 'immersive installation' wafts in with a laugh of its aesthetic impropriety.  Like a fart joke. ...  Even the more tasteful tinged yellow by Armelder's power bomb of a painting. It's a gas. Paintings which look the way 'oopsie' sounds. Whether or not anyone else loves is it in relation to how deeply trapped they are with it. Fart aesthetics in the high speech."

"evolution doesn't always lead to advancement, occasionally a butthole develops on a forehead, leaves a whole family tree in ruin ..."

Group show at suns.works

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The fireworks punchline of "locally hated" serves as allegory: all verb, no noun. A cymbals crash without setup. There is no punchline, it distends into a question. Who, or what, to be stamped on any of these objects. The lack of place. A metaphor for art, all question, no x. Do you ever feel like you're looking out at an ever receding beach?

Emily Barker at Sentiment

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This is a good press release.

Leave the world designed for your body and encounter "terrain." Recognize now how much of this world been groomed for you, molded for you. This is called Bushwacking and it is incredibly energy expensive, both physically and psychologically, and the explorer is encouraged to carry a machete, as removing the offending material is often less demanding than pushing through. 

Magnus Plessen at Mai 36

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Pretty desperate to know where this ends up hanging.

Alex Becerra at Karma International

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IN 2014 Alex Becerra was titling exhibitions "problematic whores" and getting reviews in Frieze and LA Times. Lauding him for "the self-granted freedom ... that no white artist would dare put his name to.""clearly feel[ing] no pressure to self-censor, which is a rare thing today, not just amongst artists." Now almost 10 years later the paintings are tame and the "reviews" come from culture magazines. It's a classic shift of the painter entering midcareer yes, but also a measure of how the art world has childproofed itself. No more edge, is it growing up or growing old?

ART CLUB2000 atKunsthalle Zürich

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A little too early they were. They the waypoint between General Idea and 2015's Surround Audience. 

2015: "10 years ago avenues to visibility were tightly controlled ... Today youth of the post-net are really post image-democratization, a time in which all images come preloaded with mass audiential capabilities, matched by cheap raw visibility's fungible version, exchangeable with any world (fashion, commerce, literature) equally, the gold standard of different disciplines."

But maybe GI was somehow ahead of it all, interested in viral conditions packaged in Trojan horses, not the medium but the dissemination as content.

See too: Surround Audience New Museum Triennial

Greg Parma Smith at Galerie Francesca Pia

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Faceting jewels of symbols in cultural stone, painting, to attribute the glyphs a more meaningful nonsense. This is what painting is, a burning of effort, an expenditure of culture, to ordain the halo on cherubic vessels, whatever vogue angel. The potato chip company values their crisp by turning the packaging auburn, the natural halo, this is moral. The painter asks for investment in his through something else, but it is also moral. The cultural search for taste, gems in the temple. 

Isabelle Cornaro at Galerie Francesca Pia

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A grey that matches. Our new walls. The borders of virtual and real become porous, making the object float in virtual space, in their new home. You would almost think it wasn't coincidence. A gradientless lighting, the artist's overt concern with silvered surface.