Miranda Fengyuan Zhang at Capsule Shanghai

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Glenn Gould, The Little Mermaid, bubbles, hands, fish tails, feet - painting as an interface, a series of icons hyperlinking content. Stitching a resemblance to primitive graphic user interface. Hover the hand, click the link to access the text. The Byzantine icon is a terminal to god, a shaman's press release. Painting today.

Seth Price at Galerie Gisela Capitain

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Technologies alter reality is truism so true it becomes unthinkable. Price: "Meaning is a technology invented by writing." Ripple effects and, Us, a fish who cannot see water. The map invents territory. Meaning invents shamans, invents art. Painting invents heavens, perspective, invented the afterlife of your image. Painting invented the first user interface. Google Images invents Dispersion. Is this why Price is always noodling in new image tech? Searching for the printing/painting method that will finally rearrange painting if not us. It would seem futile if 100 years ago inventing flatness hadn't rearranged art totally, my god. The painting interface had invented an anti-skeuomorphism. Now Price maybe inventing some Sci-fi style floating keyboard. But visions for the future comically misalign with the banality of what takes place. Looking out into the heavens of virtual reality is impotent to our necks craned down to a stupid black mirror in hand. UI is more powerful than storytelling, than meaning, than art. Like our demise at a climate crisis, it will be less flashy, rearranging our maps will be banal. In the meantime painting will be great fantasy of meaning's user experience.  

See too: "...Has Price gone 'painting'? In hindsight despite all the technologic and cultural baggage, Price's containers were always forcing that enigma of painting into the vessels... Price's continuous plastering optical illusions on. ,,,Which here Price's fascination with images: the point being any sufficiently advanced imaging technology might be indistinguishable from painting's magic."

"... His long term subject and maybe Price's longterm point is proving that this is actually an axiom of art, left clutching ink resembling but not quite actualizing a human."

Group Show at Derosia

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Large time is measured in amounts of crust. The sedimentary layers of geologic time, the half-inches of coral bones measuring years. Everything being buried, so slowly it's concealed. The dust accumulating day-to-day unnoticeably until a high-shelf's gray suddenly disgusted, its slow burial in ash. We speed the process by our anthropogenic layering, the landfills ticked in eras of Christmas trends, a furby layer, the urban stratigraphy of asphalt to roman roads. Dust Breeding. Moyra Davey, Walead Beshty, artists accumulating patina. A slower landfill, a glitter of entropy: divorce. Everything accumulates a dark, the dust to which we will return. This is the promise, more crud, marked by our artists' endless sunsetting.

LaKela Brown at 105 Henry

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Treating our cultural symbols as fossils is a refreshingly honest take. This is what art does today. Imports culture to play anthropology. You sediment facts, say the "amount of money that would have averted a 12 year old's death," as a skeletal relic, a specimen, into painting. So art can play forensic insight. This is how the artworld "deals" with the world, how it allows the world into the museum, the world it wants to talk about but can't without the permission slip of painting. If there's critique here it's in the artist being forced to perform "a harvest" of themselves for the altar of art, being made willing and complicit to do so, for the blue haired vampires demanding cultural sacrifice in totems, dystopian trophies for the wall.

See too:  "...inventories of our blossoming desires ... bleaching like coral reefs whose left white skeletons trace a once thriving culture... a ghost of taxonomic fossils remaining, held for the assessment of all the dreams of a life embedded."

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Matthew Lutz-Kinoy at Capitain Petzel

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Certain CAD darlings that just not interest. Repeated, the work is blinkered by a too-bright question, why again? Long ago we were force fed Krebber, now this. Is it foppish noodles there is a taste for? Other artists appear and then, chasm, never again. Others, expected, never arrive. Wrote a Bittenbender review long ago under the expectation, but... no. Instead these backdrops again, again, like the desert of road runner cartoon, duplicated over and over to create the illusion of movement. There isn't movement, only the awaiting of sweet chasm.

Cooper Jacoby at N/A

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Jacoby leaning into the art-as-props-for-sci-fi lets the objects get weirder, their ominousness more camp fun. Less didactic moralism toward a slasher film moralism - doom becomes burlesque, giddy, far more affective, effective. The plot is in the press release/text, the means to spin the ghost story. A movie called Ed 2, Keinholz returns.

 

see too: What the PR doesn't answer is why this doomsday is so fucking sexy - there's even a bench to tell you how hot your ass is. But hadn't we just realized global cataclysm was actually pretty fucking banal, refrigerated semis full of corpses just another byline in the inexorable spread of stupidity. This is like the hotrod version, the hollywood version. Lesson:  There is money in making the interior of our doom fun. 

Our world's end, celebrate it with a commemorative lamp, luxury mirroring your wealth's participation in it.