Trying to Understand untitled-game
Like those born at the turn of this century, untitled-game is overwrought with anxiety about its own emptiness. This reflects the fear of one’s own emptiness. Are we up to the tasks of our own century?
The Shape of Confusion in Joni Murphy's Double Teenage
Two girls set out to live life. They adapt themselves to different roles within girlhood, but never attain to a fullness of any role.
“On the Right Side of History”: Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana and the Gauntlet of Cultural Liberalism
The culture industry is running on a marathon of apologies. Miss Americana, the Taylor Swift biopic on Netflix, is a prime example of pop-culture apologia bound up in a coming-of-age tale.
The New Relevance of Past Art
Utility fosters distrust in those who wish to use the aesthetic for their own purposes.
What’s So Wrong About Cats?
The spasmodic beauty of abstraction reflects the social reality of capitalist production — a kind of rationality that is not yet rational enough.
Damien Hirst: The Best Living Artist
While many artists today position themselves as critical outsiders vis à vis capitalism, Hirst embraces the fact that he — and everyone else — lives smack dab in the middle of it. Far from being capitalism’s uncritical playboy, Hirst delivers an immanent critique.
Stan Douglas: "Doppelgänger" @ David Zwirner
The careless irony gives away the suffering narration involves in a world where it is no longer possible to tell stories.
Etel Adnan: "Planètes" @ Galerie Lelong
Adnan has begun to worry the surface; she abolishes the impenetrability of her color. She is dealing with fresh problems that she has created for herself. This is one definition of freedom.
Midsommar: The Lost Reflection
The return of “art” to film even if such gestures are mere semblance, may indicate, however obliquely, a renewed desire to reconsider the medium.
Gladys Nilsson: “New Work” @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Thus the Garden fades in darkness in the memory of mankind and yet lies behind every subsequent action as the enigmatic source of its power.
Daniel Barenboim and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra: Hommage à Boulez
The question is whether these works are self-critical in their own rebellion against established forms and their limitations, or whether they dogmatically adhered to Schoenbeg’s categories in their quest for the obliteration of the subject in service of musical free will.
"A Revolutionary Impulse" @ MoMA
The fact is that the revolutionary impulse in art does not hew so cleanly to revolutionary politics.
Anne Imhof: Angst II @ Hamburger Bahnhof
And yet, the content and meaning of Angst II is excruciatingly difficult to define. The impulse to try to make the irrational moments — or the whole — meaningful is constantly frustrated.
Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room @ The New Museum
“The Waiting Room” is remarkable for its lack of concern with its institutional home and its disregard for questions of aesthetics.
TEEN: Love Yes
A critic might try to pluck TEEN from the growing heap of dance-pop bands and salvage their music by dissecting it scientifically.
London Symphony Orchestra Percussion Ensemble / Steve Reich: Sextet; Clapping Music; Music for Pieces of Wood
Within the essence of postmodern music is embedded a struggle with the necessity to toil against the interpretative and compositional standards of the status quo, and simultaneously, a fundamental confusion about how best to accomplish this.
"Capital: Debt - Territory - Utopia" @ Hamburger Bahnhof
For religious anti-capitalism, then, the sinful sides of capital must be rejected; for Koons’s affirmative postmodern attitude, you can’t but embrace them.
A Stopping Place
The text gets lost in rhetorical questions, cliché, and telling the audience what it is not about.
Miyamoto and Balcou: Breaking Historical Amnesia and Critical Gallery Practice
The task of the artist (or art critic for that matter) is perhaps not to avoid categories, but rather to temporarily show that all of them are in fact ambiguous because all of them change before our eyes, regardless of us.
Autechre: Elseq 1-5
It is affectless electronic music at its best, and it is an exegesis of self-cancellation.