AR: Guan Xiao at Antenna Space

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Originally Posted: June 12th, 2020

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Maren Hassinger at Tiwani Contemporary

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Originally Posted: November 5th, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

August Review 2020

Today we initiate our sixth annual August Review. Every year we reflect on the exhibitions that were especially memorable to us since the previous August. We will re-publish one show each day, marked by “AR:” in the title, while continuing to cover new exhibitions daily.

At the end of the month we will provide an “August Review Index.” The previous five seasons’ selections are available here: 2015, 2016, 2017 2018, and 2019.

“A Love Letter to a Nightmare” at Petzel

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Group shows always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. Sexy legs made in wheat aren't surreal but reality when a world sells children cereal with fat assed bee, then sells adults figurines of that bee. This is reality, a sexy hotdog is practically a readymade. Merely exploded.

AR: Torey Thornton at Moran Bondaroff

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Originally Posted:January 5, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) at Balice Hertling

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Originally Posted: July 26th, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Group Show at Kunsthal Charlottenborg

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We all thought DIS was responding to the internet but were actually getting in line with the turn toward aestheti-tainment. Museums and galleries, no longer solvent on symbolic capital, with a relevancy we could call dusty, turned toward audience engagement, and realigned with missions with populist modes. They invited celebrities for ad campaigns, made memes and light of their own once stiflingly prestigious collections, having lost distinction between low and high the museums to middle brow with a budget, a sort of consumerist factory of light experience. A prediction for our future.


See too: “Stories of Almost Everyone” at Hammer Museum