A conservative politician walks out on stage to Rage Against the Machine. He is said to "not to get it." "You are the machine" someone dunks. X erupts. Bruce Springsteen is sought for comment.The cat is hit in head with a large mallet. This repeats every election cycle - it is our annual scientific experiment in the field of aesthetics. The loudspeakers pump meaning to a large sample size. Last year we selected "Born in the USA." The conservative politician wins. This is how art means. 

I have left the three emojis. There in the cradle beneath your image. These three emojis are the legal representation of the cornucopia of my care. Three hearts, the tithe and taxation of my attention. This one has an arrow through it. Curator, do you see these three plums of my engagement? They are my soul, my tender. Three diamonds, three magi bearing at your manger. This is not a panopticon, I promise I love. These three lightning bolts I have carved for you represent your Zeus like stature. That is why I carved them for you. You are not balding. Your lipstick trustworthy. You should consider wielding, a trident. I meant to say you posts are redolent and insightful, but instead I have left the three emojis from the icebox we share.

We have grown tired of critique. Grown past it. Grown into something more agreeable, more contrite, more pleasing to the eye. Just pleasant to be around. To be liked. Not so much respected. No one respects the wind, but a cool breeze is necessary. To be the wind at our backs making steps easier. To make our positioning amiable. That's what we're here for today. A more colorful world. The crunch that sells the candy. What is there left but instagram posts of artist portraits celebrating birthdays, smiling and excellent whites. We're all so friendly, all friends, this is friendly smiling. I am not imagining blood. I am not trying to kill you with my mind. I am not speaking through gritted teeth a preferable opinion. I am not lamenting the ass kiss that you are. I have never once at the bar said unkind things about your artists, never spoken ill of his collecting. Never seen the nepotism. Never held tongue of another to make it speak something I wanted to hear. This bowl of cherries is cadmium and doesn't require press release. I have instagrammed it to show I believe in beauty despite my gallery roster. The following things are bad:

Michaela Eichwald at Neue Galerie Gladbeck

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Has Eichwald gone pleasant? Surely there could be some critically interesting reason for the turn.. but what is it? A flower has grown from the mud? All that previous gasping intestinals, mud men, and tube brown were only mulch, to grow this? When Oehlen made his turn from swamp butt to the smeared super Crest contemporary there was something something kept, the stupidity of smearing paint. But these are pure handsome, brushed hair and all. 

See all: Michaela Eichwald

Hamishi Farah at Maxwell Graham / Essex Street

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It's a hard press release to beat. One can only be more explicit. In gaming, "the meta" is the strategy created by players using knowledge of the inner workings of the game mechanics. For something like chess, "playing the meta" is axiomatic to the game, whereas for a role playing game, a certain suspension of disbelief is required, and "playing the meta" is frowned upon. Since Art is our collective cloud based MMORPG, it is a game requiring its players to pretend like they aren't playing the meta - like they didn't lick the curator's cheeks clean after dinner. Like their abstractions are of conceptual merit. We know art's function and follow that to its form. Broodthaers aside, artists acknowledging the meta is tongue in cheek - Krebber or contingent painting or whatever. But Art's meta was basically laid out by Bourdieu and everyone kind of just steps around this like they stepped around the rich but racist patron until recently it became more meta advantageous to call them out publicly. The meta is always up for debate. The point is, "black portraiture has been through an intense though not unprecedented revaluation in recent years" and that was white's first move. Black to move next. And since we know art's inner function can predict the form, and lo: Farah makes that obvious move, Black Painting. Farah does what he does best, the politics self represent. The exchange in chess, in art, is a foregone conclusion. It's the stupid, brazenly open transaction, of seeing the pawn offered, being taken, that makes it fun.

See too: Hamishi Farah at Fri Art

Ibrahim Mahama at Kunsthalle Osnabrück

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Dressing the city building in the linen of "forced laborers" - it's.. a metaphor for sure. But putting a dress on a building interestingly Venturi-Scott-Browns it’s architectural identification. The building could display its intention, signal its function. The building should work for us, even if the linen's historic symbolism is a bit... But its the only way symbolism works, you explicitly tell people what it means. 

Past: Jesse Benson

"... the closer it can be to being without qualities, is its psychedelic quality. The paintings warble in closeness to a reality that they fail to produce. " "the asymptotic approach to image, falling towards the ground it aims at and missing, closer, closer, closer, feel vertigo.

Click: Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento, Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento (2)