How to Toil in Obscurity
You probably don’t need me to tell you about toil and obscurity. You don’t need me to tell you about working a double-shift waiting…
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Faulty Infrastructure: New Orleans’s Triennial Can’t Commit
Nine years after the inaugural Prospect show of 2008, what can the exhibition that christened itself the United States’s only international biennial offer in…
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Maria Hupfield Returns to the Beginning
Maria Hupfield is a Brooklyn-based artist from Wasauksing First Nation, an Anishinabek community on Parry Island, five hours north of Toronto along Georgian Bay….
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Dubious Icons: Godheads, Messiahs, and the Artist as Celebrity
Perhaps it’s an unfair caricature of MFA students, that each appears to inhabit their own personalized reality TV show. Perhaps. But having been one…
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“Afrogallonism” Takes Dubai: South-South Solidarity and the Urge to Exoticize
Yellow’s a strange cornstarch slurry of a word, one that quickly gets thick on the tongue and loses all meaning. Its symbolism oscillates wildly,…
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The Listening Gaze: Raymond Gervais (1946-2018)
People ask me from time to time where I got my interest in music, in musical objects and records, and why I refer to…
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From Artworld Punchline to Real-World Parable: Ruben Östlund’s “The Square”
The degree to which contemporary culture understands (or fails to understand) “The Art World” can be measured in how it gets portrayed in film…
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Freeing Latin American Art from Eurocentric Curating
A dense black explosion looms, static in the museum’s center. Nuclear Fungus (2007), by Argentinean artist León Ferrari, sculpturally simulates the smoke caused by…
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“Seen Anything Good?” The Burden of Biennial Excess
How much art can the human mind realistically absorb from a mega-exhibition? I’m not talking about superstar retrospectives or major surveys – mainstays of…
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“Speaking from a Wound”: Jesse Darling on Faith, Crisis, and Refusal
Over the past year, I’ve had considerable difficulty maintaining my faith in art. In the short version of this introduction to an interview, I…
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