Allan McCollum at Mary Boone

(link)

McCollum's brute force attack on "creativity," ironizing uniqueness with its interminable variation, like try and stand out in this crowd kid, pulling out the cornerstones of value with machine made uniqueness, the scary "algorithm," and handcrafted replaced with stand-ins, surrogates, and stage props. Making uniqueness bland. How cruel. Showing on the doll where the creativity hurt him. It all ends in death. Did you think your bones were unique. etc.


See too: Rob Pruitt at MOCAD

“Sputterances” at Metro Pictures

(link)

No myth that curators are beholden to a "conversation," one that manifests by reinscribing and working around the general pool of artists we see commonly. Curators show certain art/artists to prove (and thus renew) their access to the structure that legitimates them. Reciprocal legitimization by no single curatorial/artist node but instead the conversational majority, arranging consensus by those delegates already given authority, e.g. curators, institutions. Access starts to look like legitimacy. This insight why CAD took off. Read Sanchez's "Contemporary Art, Daily."  This why we see artists/exhibitions in triplicate, the same ones proffered around the globe. You proffer 3 givens, and one unknown.  And so maybe artists make more enjoyable curators because they're freed from the profession's need to prove the contemporaneousness of the vision, you get something a bit more idiosyncratic, interesting.

Michael Krebber at Kunsthalle Bern

(link)


Remember when this was fresh? was fun?  Krebber's "preferring not to" the herald of his artistic progeny, fantasizing that maybe they wouldn't have to either. And so artistry's lack became a claim of radical "protest," artist's claiming "strike" on the walls of the institutions that would have them, taking sumptuous bites of the hand that had become feed.  Promising the academic artist a taste of social cool, and the socially posturing a pen of legitimacy. All very radical then, yes. Then we saw video of cops killing people. It's clever writing trope to then ask if a world where these are still interesting is better or worse.

Maria von Hausswolff at Johan Berggren

Maria von Hausswolff at Johan Berggren

Recalling deep sea photography above ground of course estranges. Blackness, depth, unknown. The trick is adept, the cinematic isolation of terrain turns it to vignettes of a dreamed world, us tourists, Planet Earth or Alien. They're both the same film, same worlds. As the title implies. Ours is a lovely world, so deploying it as its spectacular self, a fine filmic conceit. And its made almost literal here, moralistic, the cinematographer is the tourist, is the alien. We should probably all be.

Dorota Jurczak at Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart

(link)

The reproducibility of artwork to fit not necessarily CAD's but all documentation framing as an object denoting and connoting its own meaning among an order of objects, it's ability to stand as icon for what it represents, iconic, gives it worth. Some exhibitions don't wear CAD well. The ability to spread through social mechanisms now more relevant ever, a pressure on art that increasingly resembles survival of those most fittest to reproduce.


see too: And so Quarterly has finally come to pass., Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, CAD

Andrea Crespo at Downs & Ross

(link)

The Deviant Art and similar holdings of niche communities, of which Crespo has spoken, and cautions against exoticizing, i.e. the "longtail" populations coalescing around alternative and often subaltern formulations of identity and outlets for expression of desires/needs outside dominant frames, not necessarily just alternate sexual aspects of futanari or furry et al, but growing niche groups seeking alternative expressions of sensitivities - similar but not inclusive to fetish relations to sexuality - and their aesthetic experiments in alternate systems of visual expressions for such sensitivities that are so attuned as to be outside the given framework for acceptability, niche communities exactly, we can be obviously very sympathetic, is very similar to art, and which Crespo draws from.

Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts

(link)

Passive aggression, that everyone knows, that operates on the affectual level, sublingual, by screwing tone and denying the target a substantive system on which to respond, functions well too for art in discombobulating the viewer whose reaction to such discrepant attitudes can only remain uncertain, the perfect art fount, the new psychedelic experience of the RFA brand updating conceptual art for a new generation of well-versed conceptually-high-tolerant semionauts, the new drug the complete meltdown of conceptual sense.



See too: Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, CAWD on Desensitization, Michele Abeles at 47 Canal,