Sidestepping Violence: The German Pavilion’s Failure to See the Present in the Past
At first glance, the earth spilling out from behind the tall, squared columns of the German pavilion’s facade appears to be a pile of…
Read MoreHans Haacke
Relocating Trauma at the Venice Biennale
During my visit to the 59th Venice Biennale, I found myself in the Venetian ghetto twice. The first was to celebrate Shabbat with an…
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Ambivalent Transparency: Artists Go on and “Off the Record” at Guggenheim
In the spring of 1971, the Guggenheim was set to open a solo exhibition from German conceptualist Hans Haacke. It included two installations of…
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Where Do We Go From Here? Dubious Wealth and Ethical Funding
In the popular imagination, calling someone a “modern Medici” is a synonym for “visionary patron of the arts.” That association itself shows how much…
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Conspiracy, Discounted Histories, and Nostalgia at the Met Breuer
A common analogy for a sprawling, hypnotic, and potentially fruitless search on the Internet is the rabbit hole: dark, long, and terminating in a…
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Archeology and Ambivalence at Austria’s Steirischer Herbst Festival
One morning in Graz, a woman carries a large portrait of Adolf Hitler on a bus through the center of the city. It’s an…
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What to Do About Klaus: How Arts Communities Assert Their Agency
As first impressions go, it wasn’t ideal. On the week he was announced as MOCA Los Angeles’s new director, Klaus Biesenbach managed to alienate…
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“How to Lie About Canadian Art”: A Case Study in Art Criticism
Art criticism doesn’t often speculate on the value of pithy maxims such as ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” But when an article…
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On Kawara’s “I Am Still Alive” Twitter Presence: An Anomaly in Post-Internet Art
The most grievous problem with post-internet art has been its nebulousness. If, as Saelan Twerdy recently claimed in Momus, post-internet art may have reached…
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