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    Debates About How to Interpret Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Art Are Raging. A New Show Is Proposing a Fresh Way of Reading It

    Last fall, a few astute visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago noticed that the museum had quietly swapped out the wall text for Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 artwork Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). Whereas a previous placard alluded to the artist’s late partner, Ross Laycock, who died from an AIDS-related illness the same year the piece was created, the new signage simply describes Untitled’s conceptual framework.
    “The erasure of Ross’s memory and Gonzalez-Torres’s intent in the new description is an unconsciable [sic] and banal evil,” read one Twitter user’s post, which was reshared on the platform thousands of times. Others online soon decried the museum’s supposed act of “erasure,” too, and some even postulated that it was part of a larger effort on the part of Gonzalez-Torres’s foundation to distance the artist’s biography from his work.
    “There’s no obliterating Felix’s biography. [There’s] no desire to, no reason to,” said Andrea Rosen, president of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, when asked about the incident in a recent interview. Near the Art Institute’s label for Untitled, she pointed out, is a QR code that directs viewers to an audio guide describing the work’s connection to Laycock and the context of the AIDS epidemic. 
    Rosen was clearly rankled by the accusations of erasure. That she would feel that way makes sense: A former dealer, Rosen hosted one of Gonzalez-Torres’s first solo shows in 1990, and continued to represent him up to and beyond his death in 1996 from AIDS-related illness. For three decades now, she has been the foremost promoter of his work; their accomplishments are inseparable. (Rosen now co-represents the artist’s estate with David Zwirner.)    
    Still, she managed to find a silver lining. “It is crazy how Felix’s work continues to generate such meaningful and complex dialogue,” Rosen said. “Thank god!” 
    Installation view of “Felix Gonzalez-Torres” at David Zwirner, New York, January 12 – February 25, 2023. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
    Indeed, what the incident at the Art Institute illustrated was the complexities and nuances inherent to Gonzalez-Torres’s work—and the intense personal connection to his story that many feel. 
    Those upset by the eliding of Laycock and AIDS from the museum’s wall label weren’t wrong. That’s the thing about Gonzalez-Torres’s work: It allows, even encourages, different emotional reactions. From his poetic billboards to his piles of candy, no artist was better at generating conceptual prompts that felt both personal and universal, both specific enough to grab you and open-ended enough for myriad points of entry. 
    Now, on the occasion of Gonzalez-Torres’s new exhibition at David Zwirner, where two installations conceived by Gonzalez-Torres have been realized for the first time, Rosen and the rest of her team are again thinking about the unique interpretability of the artist’s output. The show marks the formal introduction of the Foundation’s new Core Tenets—that is, a series of documents that outline the conceptual parameters of Gonzalez-Torres’s artworks. 
    Through Zwirner’s website, gallery-goers are provided with sheets of paper that look, at first glance, like contracts. That is what they are, in a way—contracts that define the rules of works on display, based on language from the artist himself. 
    “Each of the candy works is a unique artwork… The candy works, as with all manifestable works, exist regardless of whether they are physically manifest… The possibility for the work to be manifested with ease is an ongoing intention of the work,” reads some of the bulleted tenets for Gonzalez-Torres’s candy installations, one example of which (“Untitled” (Public Opinion) from 1991) is on view at Zwirner in two different parts of the gallery. 
    A page from the “Core tenets of Gonzalez-Torres’s candy works,” an in-process draft fromJanuary 9, 2023. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
    Printed on foundation letterhead, the documents are dry and rather dense. Each catalogues the works to which the stated tenets apply (there are 20 iterations on the “Candy Works” document, including Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)), and boasts a list of postscript annotations long enough to make David Foster Wallace blush. 
    So authoritative are the tenets that they almost feel like a direct response to the Art Institute controversy. Viewed through that lens, it is as if the documents are saying, “No, this is how you read Gonzalez-Torres.”
    But Rosen said that the project, which goes back years, is about doing the exact opposite. The idea, she explained, is to point to “what is stable within Felix’s work,” while also showing how individual installations fit within a broader corpus. 
    It’s a novel solution to the unique challenges of presenting and experiencing this particular artist’s creations. For those that already find Gonzalez-Torres too heady, the tenets may feel like more homework. 
    But then again, who really thinks that about him? The artist’s genius came through his ability to establish a set of conditions to which everyone—from academics to children copping a piece of candy—could relate on their own terms. To its credit, the Tenets project gets that people will bring to Gonzalez-Torres’s work the kind of intense attention that only comes through personal connection.
    Installation view of “Felix Gonzalez-Torres” at David Zwirner, New York, January 12 – February 25, 2023. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
    Rosen echoed this idea too, noting that the project “creates as much responsibility for people to understand the work as it does provide information.” Rosen went on, “It’s a way of becoming a kind of Felix thinker.”
    And it’s not objectivity the foundation is after. In addition to the tenets, Rosen also commissioned a handful of writers and curators to reflect on their own, highly subjective relationships to Gonzalez-Torres’s art in a series of audio essays that are available on Zwirner’s website.
    “The more subjectivity around Felix, the more diverse ideas around Felix—the better,” Rosen said.
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    The Winter Show in New York Dazzles Collectors and Browsers Alike With Its Troves of Rare Art and Antiques

    Widely regarded as the foremost art, antiques, and design fair in the United States, the annual Winter Show has returned to New York’s landmark Park Avenue Armory (January 20–29) in all its gleaming, glinting glory. Serious collectors and casual observers alike can browse the carefully curated booths of vetted works. 
    Last year, the Winter Show set up shop in the shell of the former Barney’s flagship on Madison Avenue—a clever, if temporary, move precipitated by pandemic concerns. For 2023, the New York fixture is back in the Armory’s vaulted vastness, where it has proffered historical treasures for 65 of the last 69 years. Once again, it aims to engage visitors with items spanning 5,000 years of human history, culled from galleries around the world—68 in all. 
    It’s an astounding array of works, ranging from vibrant contemporary ceramics and jewelry to gilded antiques and furniture of the more traditional variety, offering show-goers not only aesthetically appealing but historically significant art and objects through the centuries. 
    George II period Chinese red lacquer bureau on stand (Chinese, ca. 1750). Exhibited by Ronald Phillips LTD
    Every object on show is vetted to ensure the highest standards of authenticity and quality. “We have 120 experts in 30 fields, from antiquities and metalwork to European painting and textiles to 20th- and 21st-century design—to name just a few,” the fair’s executive director Helen Allen told Artnet News. The vetting committees change each year, she added, depending on the disciplines on display. “Our vettors are a combination of dealers, curators, restorers, and former auction-house specialists.” 
    Jean-Baptiste-Claude Odiot, The Madame Mère Inkstand Paris (1812). Exhibited by Koopman Rare Art.
    Asked whether she’s spotted any trends this year, either on the supply or demand side, Allen said, “There is definitely a big push to represent artists often overlooked in the contemporary market, and we are seeing a strong interest in this through focused presentations.” As an example, she pointed to exhibitor Robert Simon, who’s curated an exhibition of works by women artists from the Renaissance through the 20th century.
    Nestled in a darkened corner of “Heroines of the Brush” sits a small yet enthralling depiction of the Madonna and child by nun-artist Suor Plautilla Nelli, the earliest known woman Renaissance painter of 16th-century Florence. “Plautilla Nelli is a special interest of mine,” Simon told Artnet News, “having studied the artist since I was in graduate school and, rare as her paintings are, having had another about 15 years ago.” This one was acquired, he explained, after it recently emerged from a private collection in Tuscany, where it was thought to be an anonymous work. “But the style is unmistakably hers, and the attribution of the painting to Plautilla Nelli was confirmed by two scholars who have published on the artist.”
    Suor Plautilla Nelli (Florence, 1524–1588), Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Catherine, Ursula, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, exhibited by Robert Simon Fine Art. Courtesy of the Winter Show.
    The 2023 edition brings 14 new exhibitors to the Winter Show. Among them, Eguiguren Arte de Hispanoamérica from Buenos Aires, Argentina, has displayed an impressive selection of antique Hispanic American art and equestrian silver. Imperial Art, hailing from Paris, specializes in pre-revolution French paintings and objets d’art. The centerpiece of its booth is a floor-to-ceiling royal portrait of King Louis XIV by the studio of Hyacinthe Rigaud. Pictured in his coronation robes, the Sun King commands fealty.
    Studio of Hyacinthe Rigaud, Portrait of Louis XIV in Coronation Robes (ca. 1702). Provenance: Dukes of Noailles. Exhibited by Imperial Art.
    George Nakashima, conoid table and ten chairs (1969). Persian walnut, East Indian rosewood, American black walnut. Exhibited by Geoffrey Diner Gallery. Courtesy of the Winter Show.
    They join returning exhibitor Geoffrey Diner Gallery, specialist in postwar art and design, particularly the designs of George Nakashima and Gio Ponti. The booth’s all-wood Nakashima table is an outstanding example of the artist’s experimentation with free edges and fissures. Hirschl & Adler Galleries of New York also returns with American and European paintings, such as those by Charles Willson Peale, who not only painted leaders of the American Revolution but participated in combat as well. And longtime exhibitor Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts greets visitors as they enter the Armory with three bronzes: Auguste Rodin’s miniature Pierre de Wiessant, a reclining figure by Henry Moore, and Jacques Lipchitz’s towering Lesson of a Disaster (1961–70). Standing at the front entrance, the latter’s depiction of a phoenix rising out of flames is an unambiguous reiteration of the fair’s message of revival.
    Auguste Rodin, Pierre de Wiessant, “Bourgeois de Calais,” (ca. 1905). Exhibited by Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts.
    Tiffany Studios, Rare Snowball Window (ca. 1905), exhibited by Lillian Nassau. Courtesy of the Winter Show.
    Lillian Nassau, too, returns with a host of Gilded Age leaded-glass works by Tiffany Studios, as well as an intricate glass window attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright. Michele Beiny brings exquisite contemporary ceramics and antique porcelains from Meissen and Sèvres. A gold cast of German supermodel Veruschka’s lips—designed and cast by Claude Lalanne, manufactured by Milanese jeweler GianCarlo Montebello—beckons from the booth of Didier Ltd. The gallery is asking $200,000 for the one-of-a-kind 18-karat piece of jewelry, commissioned by Yves Saint Laurent in 1969 and published in Vogue in December of that year.
    Details of Claude Lalanne, Bouche (1969). Exhibited by Didier Ltd.
    Pennsylvania dealer Kelly Kinzle has rolled out a real showstopper, a limited-edition 1930 Commodore Roadster by Italian luxury car manufacturer Isotta Fraschini, which Kinzle compared to Rolls-Royce of England, its main competitor at the time. “It really takes the air out of the room,” he beamed, explaining that the car could reach 100 miles per hour, quite a feat in its day. Kinzle said his asking price is $1.45 million for this exemplary automobile, which features a Lalique hood ornament.
    Isotta Fraschini, body by Carrozzeria Castagna, 1930 Commodore Roadster. Exhibited by Kelly Kinzle.
    Medieval enthusiasts will want to stop in at Daniel Crouch‘s booth, where a volvelle astronomical calendar takes pride of place among rare books and antique maps. Crouch said it’s the only such calendar to have survived from the Middle Ages, hanging for over three centuries in the cloister of the San Zeno Abbey in Verona, Italy, where it would have been seen by all the monks several times every day. Crouch explained that the object has been dated to approximately 1455 using its own time-tracking rotational mechanisms—which, he noted, puts it within a year of the printing of the Gutenberg Bible. The stellar provenance befits its $1.5 million asking price.
    San Zeno Astrolabe, cloister of San Zeno abbey (ca. 1455). Exhibited by Daniel Crouch Rare Books.
    One must-see presentation is not for sale: The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), in partnership with East Side House and Bank of America, is showcasing treasures from two of its costume collections—the exquisite hand-tailored qipaos of Aileen Pei (stepmother of architect I.M. Pei) and the intricate opera gowns of the Chinese Musical and Theatrical Association, which promoted and preserved opera in New York’s Chinatown primarily in the 1920s and ‘30s, the golden age of Cantonese opera in the United States.
    Opera costumes exhibited by the Museum of Chinese in America. Courtesy of the Winter Show.
    In addition to wowing visitors with its worldly wares, the Winter Show serves another purpose: to support the East Side House Settlement, a community-based organization benefiting the children, families, and community of the Bronx and northern Manhattan. The fair will put all ticket sale proceeds toward this cause, which it has done since its founding in the 1950s.
    The Winter Show is on view at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, New York, January 20–29, 2023.
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    British-Ghanaian Filmmaker John Akomfrah Will Represent the United Kingdom at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024

    John Akomfrah, the British-Ghanaian artist whose ambitious films and screened installations have tackled colonial legacies, climate change, and immigration, has been selected to represent Britain at the 60th Venice Biennale, set to open in April 2024.
    The nomination was announced today by the British Council, which has been responsible for the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale since 1937. 
    In a statement, ​​Akomfrah called the commission a “huge privilege and an [honor],” adding that “it is without a doubt one of the most exciting opportunities that an artist can be presented with.” 
    Akomfrah, 65, is widely regarded as one of the most influential video artists of his generation. 
    Born in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, the artist’s family fled to Britain when he was just four. In 1982, he was one of seven founding artists behind Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), a group formed with the goal of increasing the representation Black British communities on screen. The collective’s first film, Handsworth Songs, won the BFI John Grierson Award for Best Documentary in 1986.
    Since then, Akomfrah has consistently turned to his chosen medium to explore topics that are both timely and universal in scope. Among the highlights are Mnemosyne (2010), a film about the experiences of post-war migrants living in the U.K.; The Unfinished Conversation (2012), a poetic portrait of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall; and Purple (2017), a 62-minute, six-channel video installation that explores the effects of changing climate patterns on human communities and natural ecosystems across the globe.
    John Akomfrah, Four Nocturnes (2019). © Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy of Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery.
    Next year’s presentation will mark Akomfrah’s third turn at the Biennale, following, most recently, his presentation of the film Four Nocturnes, which was commissioned for the inaugural Ghana Pavilion at the 58th iteration of the show in 2019. The artist’s Vertigo Sea (2015) was also included in the Okwui Enwezor-curated main show in 2015.  
    Other artists to have represented Britain at the prestigious expo in recent years include Phyllida Barlow, Sarah Lucas, Cathy Wilkes, and Golden Lion winner Sonia Boyce. As with those figures, who were all over the age of 50 when commissioned, it seems the British Council panel of nominators prioritized Akomfrah’s long history of artistic triumphs. Though the list of Akomfrah’s recent accomplishments is impressive too: in 2017, he won the Artes Mundi prize, the U.K.’s biggest award for international art, while just this month, he was knighted as part of the King’s New Year Honours List for 2023.
    “John’s inspiring style and narrative has continuously evolved, revealing key ideas and questions about the world we inhabit,” Skinder Hundal, the British Council’s Global Director of Arts and the Commissioner of the British Pavilion, said of the artist’s nomination.
    “The quality and contextual depth of his artistry never fails to inspire deep reflection and awe. For the British Council to have such a significant British-Ghanaian artist in Venice is an exhilarating moment.”
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    With a Trio of Exhibitions in Paris, Philippe Starck Reflects on the Renewed Enthusiasm for His Radical Designs of the 1980s

    French designer Philippe Starck’s pioneering work from the 1980s, which unabashedly subverted classical forms, is spotlighted in a trio of exhibitions in Paris. They evince the zealous interest in Starck’s output from that decade, which led to his becoming a household name through industrial products such as the lemon squeezer, Louis Ghost chair for Kartell, and innumerable hotels and restaurants worldwide.
    Starck’s furniture pieces are included in the multi-disciplinary extravaganza “Années 80. Mode, design et graphisme en France” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (through April 16) alongside furniture by fellow designers Martin Szekely and Elisabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti, as well as Jean-Paul Goude’s graphic photography of Grace Jones and fashion by the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler.
    His work is also the subject of two gallery shows: “Ubik,” the title of Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction novel after which Starck named his agency, at Ketabi Bourdet (January 20–February 18) and another at Jousse Entreprise (March 10–25).
    Yet Starck, renowned for his radical and humorous vision, is bemused by the renewed enthusiasm for his 1980s production. “I’ll reuse the words of a friend: Getting older is awful,” he told Artnet News at Ketabi Bourdet’s preview. His attendance was a surprise for the gallery, which mounted the exhibition without his input.
    “I don’t think anything of the past; I’ve always thought about the future but never about the past,” continued Starck, whose fascination with futuristic forms and materials comes from his father, an aeronautical engineer. “I’m very happy to see all this here with all these charming people, but it doesn’t concern me.”
    Asked about the spike of market interest in his 1980s pieces, he added: “It’s completely artificial because they think that I’m going to die, so one must increase the market value. It’s normal speculation in the field of artistic creation.”
    “What’s interesting is that the pieces were made with nothing,” Starck recalled. “We had zero money, no one believed in us, there was no investment, we produced the pieces ourselves. It really was an incredible adventure.”
    Installation view, “Ubik.” Courtesy of Ketabi Bourdet.
    The show presents Starck’s greatest hits alongside rarer pieces and exemplifies how he invariably quashed conventions, such as the traditional four-legged chair. Among these pieces are the Pat Conley II armchair (1983), its seat gracefully sloping to the ground; the Dr Sonderbar armchair (1983) in stainless chrome metal, its ellipsoidal form standing on just three legs; the black, highly graphic chairs Miss Dorn (1982) and Wendy Wright (1986), and the neon Easylight (1979), reminiscent of Dan Flavin’s sculptures.
    Prices reach as high as €65,000 ($70,704) for the rare sofa Canapé Prince de Fribourg et Treyer (1987), which has been purchased by a Hong Kong-based foundation. Other pieces have been sold to younger buyers for whom the exuberance of the 1980s is a relative discovery, according to the gallery.
    “Starck is the designer who really embodied the 1980s through advertising and unrestrained craziness,” said Paul Bourdet, co-founder of Ketabi Bourdet. Bourdet started collecting Starck’s furniture in 2015 while working at Galerie Downtown François Laffanour prior to inaugurating his gallery with Charlotte Ketabi-Lebard. “I was really looking at who could be the next [designer] in the market after Jean Prouvé and Pierre Paulin,” he explained.
    Across the Seine in the 1980s exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs are pieces that pinpoint Starck’s institutional importance. Fauteuil Club (1983) was acquired during François Mitterrand’s presidency for the bedroom of his wife, Danielle, at the Elysée. Typifying Starck’s anti-bourgeois approach, Fauteuil Club upended the affluent association with classical armchairs by emptying the inside and embedding an aluminum-molded seat and two metal legs—eventually with just one.
    Installation view, “Années 80. Mode, design et graphisme en France.” Courtesy of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.
    “Starck is the best-known designer [from the 1980s] because he popularized design; his father transmitted to him the idea that research was a mission and that one should create for the largest number [of people],” said Karine Lacquemant, the exhibition’s co-curator. “His journey remains emblematic, from his commitment to innovative design to his talent as an interior designer (Les Bains Douches nightclub)—marking the decade with his visionary spirit.”
    On the secondary market, it is Starck’s more recent works from the early 2000s and 1990s that have fetched the highest amounts. His auction record is for a black crystal chandelier, Lustre Zénith (2006), which sold at Artcurial in 2006 for €59,195 ($74,930).
    The prices of his works from the 1980s are still relatively affordable, according to Florent Jeanniard, co-director of design at Sotheby’s. “The pieces that didn’t encounter commercial success at the time and are rare today are among the most popular and sought-after works,” Jeanniard said. “These prices, to some extent, are still accessible, enabling a generation of new and young collectors to make acquisitions.”
    Philippe Starck, prototype of the Café Costes chair. Courtesy of Jousse Entreprise.
    Indeed, Jousse Entreprise’s show on Rue de Seine on the Left Bank will feature several prototypes made for specific commissions. On offer will be a 1984 prototype of the three-legged chair for Café Costes restaurant in Paris (priced at €70,000) and a 1988 prototype of a chair for the Royalton hotel in New York, besides the refined Phil Lizner bar stool for Manin restaurant in Tokyo.
    “I discovered Starck as a teenager and when I visited the Royalton in New York, I found it revolutionary because it was the precursor of boutique hotels,” said gallery director Matthias Jousse, who started collecting Starck’s works six years ago. “Starck is one of the only French designers known internationally, like Andrée Putman. What he made was very contemporary for its era [and] is still very contemporary in 2023.”
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    An Extremely Intelligent Lava Lamp: Refik Anadol’s A.I. Art Extravaganza at MoMA Is Fun, Just Don’t Think About It Too Hard

    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” is being touted as Artificial Intelligence’s triumphant arrival in the museum-art canon. So I went to see the splashy installation currently in the Museum of Modern Art’s ground-floor annex with a mission, to get a glimpse of what MoMA-approved A.I. art promises, or threatens, for the future.
    Born in Istanbul and currently based in Los Angeles, with a studio of more than a dozen people, Anadol was known for many years more for interactive public-art commissions than for work in museums and galleries. He boasts collaborations and support from the likes of Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Google. In the recent past, his stock has dramatically soared—which makes sense given the fact that his work engages with three trends that have lately shaken up the art conversation: immersive installation, NFTs, and generative A.I. “Unsupervised” combines a bit of each.
    Here is what you see at MoMA: A towering, high-res screen where abstract images morph hypnotically and ceaselessly. Sequences run a few minutes each, toggling between different styles of animation.
    The most crowd-pleasing of these simulates a seething, gravity-defying cloud of colorful fluid, the palette based on colors derived from the works in MoMA’s collection. New colors are constantly swirling into the image and taking over, the whole thing surging in and out restlessly, like a psychedelic, drugged-out ocean wave. The high-res screen renders the simulated rainbow gloop convincingly thick and dimensional.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Ben Davis.
    While this mode is the most visually memorable, it is also the one that has the least clear connection to the ostensible Big Idea of the show. “Anadol trained a sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret the publicly available data of MoMA’s collection,” the show’s description explains. “As the model ‘walks’ through its conception of this vast range of works, it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come.”
    This premise is more directly enacted in the other two types of animation, which are also harder to describe. One evolves endlessly through blobby, evocative shapes and miasmic, half-formed patterns. Sometimes an image or a part of an image briefly suggests a face or a landscape but quickly moves on, becoming something else, ceaselessly churning. It looks like this:

    A third type of animation does much the same, but with jittery networks of lines connecting different key points as the art-inspired shapes define themselves. I’m not totally sure what these vectors suggest, but they give the image texture and atmosphere. It looks like this:

    Art History, Without the History
    You definitely can tell, in these latter two types of animation, that “Unsupervised” is manifesting art-like images specifically inspired by some constellation of works in MoMA’s collection. However, despite a screen that appears as punctuation between sequences displaying dense graphics and data about what you are seeing, the exact operation is never really clarified.
    The ever-new, synthetic images of Anadol’s “Unsupervised” are blobby and chaotic, and look exactly like what art made via Generative Adversarial Networks most often looked like before the breakthroughs of DALL-E and its A.I. ilk captured the imagination of the public last year: Woozy, semi-random, art-like visual outputs, with wispy, unresolved edges. They look a little bit like preliminary sketches for art you might have seen in the original data-set (or in the galleries)—if you squint.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    The effect is pleasant. What it is not is anything like what MoMA says it is: an experience that “reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been.”
    MoMA has spent recent decades trying to move beyond the formalist ideas of art that it inherited from its founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. with his famous graph of Modernism as a bunch of styles mechanically branching off of one another. Generally, contemporary art historians would insist on rooting meaning in culture and context. Abstraction means one thing when its Gee’s Bend Quilts, another when it is Abstract Expressionism, still another when it is Tibetan sand painting, and still another when you put a bunch of images into an A.I. blender and remix them.
    It’s striking to see MoMA tacitly let a new high-tech formalism through the door, one even flatter and less historical than Barr’s—as if the curators were so excited by the wonders of A.I. that they didn’t notice. What the endorsement of “Unsupervised” as an alternative-art-history simulator insinuates, for its audience, is that art history is just a bunch of random visual tics to be permuted, rather than an archive of symbol-making practices with social meanings.

    Dreaming… Reimagined?
    Describing his works that use A.I. to make generative art out of huge datasets like “Unsupervised,” Anadol speaks of them as akin to “dreams” or “hallucinations.” But the terminology, once more, mystifies what is going on.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    As Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, citing Coleridge, in dreams (I guess I have to specify here, in human dreams) emotional causality is reversed: “Images take the shape of the effects we believe they cause. We are not terrified because some sphinx is threatening us but rather dream of a sphinx in order to explain the terror we are feeling.”
    But there is no emotional text to Anadol’s endless animation at MoMA. At most, the installation conveys a generalized awe at the machine’s superhuman capacity of visual analysis. (The fact that the soundtrack is a kind of shapeless, droning synthesizer score that is almost a cliché in “futuristic” video work doesn’t help.)
    I sat through two hours of “Unsupervised.” I can’t think of a single image in it that evoked any feeling in me besides curiosity about what it might be referencing. As one might expect, they are just aleatory acts of syntheses and recombination of properties, expressing nothing about anything in particular except for the machine’s ability to do what it is doing.

    Mis-recognizing Dystopia
    I would contend that scraping away the ill-considered metaphors (e.g. reimagined art histories, dreaming) helps to better see what’s really happening in front of your eyes.
    This would be nitpicking, though, if it weren’t for the fact that these poetic readings of the technology are selling us on a certain style of thinking about A.I. as a creative proposition, at a time when A.I. text-generation and A.I. image-generation are being deployed so fast that society is racing against the clock to catch up with the implications (as if “move fast and break things” hadn’t been discredited as a motto).
    It is because Anadol has created such a purely decorative, cheerleader-ish style of A.I. art—so different than the critical lens that artists such as Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen have brought to the subject in recent years, with great impact—that he received so much support along the way from the tech giants. Indeed, his positivity is probably an unstated condition of that support.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    In the last few years, I’ve noticed a pervasive and perverse rhetorical sleight of hand in the art-tech conversation. Call it the willful misreading of dystopia. You hear technologists reference artworks that are meant as sci-fi cautionary tales but, weirdly, purely as positive design inspiration, divorced from their prophetic moral or ethical substance. The recently trendy idea of the “metaverse,” which comes from Neal Stephenson’s grim take on virtual reality in Snow Crash, is an obvious example.
    Anadol is a notable dystopian mis-reader. When he refers to his works as “machine dreams” and “collective hallucinations,” he often says his inspiration is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. In a TED Talk, he describes having his imagination fired by the moment in that movie when the android Rachael realizes that her memories are not real, but implants. “Since that moment,” Anadol says, “one of my inspirations has been this question: What can a machine do with someone else’s memories?”
    Blade Runner is a melancholy work about the uprooted sense of self and collapsing sense of reality in a future where humanity and machine are no longer distinguishable. None of this seems to register with Anadol, just the idea that machine-generated memories are cool.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Ben Davis.
    Anadol’s first work that used A.I. to generate infinite new outputs based on a massive dataset was Archive Dreaming, executed in spectacular installation form in 2017, as an application of the experiments he had been engaged with at Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Program. It looked at 1.7 million documents and generated ever-new images based on them.
    In that same TED Talk, Anadol claims that Archive Dreaming was inspired by Borges’s famous short story The Library of Babel, which envisions a universe that is one never-ending library, whose books contain every possible combination of characters. But The Library of Babel was an intellectual horror story, a parable about the nihilism that results when all meaning collapses into nothing. When the inhabitants of Borges’s library finally realize the implications of the world they live in, they commit mass suicide!
    Keep that in mind when you are sampling the bottomless brunch of art-like A.I. imagery at MoMA.
    Mainly, the point is that these science-fiction references are mined in the most superficial way—very much as MoMA’s archive is sucked up into “Unsupervised” as context-free visual inspiration. As a result, this style of art feels emblematic of a moment in which a tech aesthetic of perpetually novel gadgetry is culturally dominant while the humanities, with their unprofitable baggage of historical and moral concerns, are being allowed to wither.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    And Then There Are the NFTs
    Don’t get me wrong. “Unsupervised” is amusing enough on its own, if you look past the cloud of mystification. It’s a bit like an extremely intelligent lava lamp.
    But if it seems a little vacant, there is reason to suspect that MoMA is incentivized not to ask too much of it.
    With his background, Anadol was well-positioned to become one of the biggest stars of the NFT art scene during the crypto boom of 2021. In fact, his “Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA Dreams” line of NFTs based on MoMA’s collection is being sold on Feral File, the NFT marketplace from the well-respected art-technologist Casey Reas (one of Anadol’s former teachers at UCLA). “Ten years ago, when we asked, Can we mint machine memories and dreams in the blockchain of one of the world’s most inspiring archives? I wouldn’t have imagined that was possible,” Anadol enthuses in MoMA Magazine. “I mean it was a very Philip K. Dick idea, but I feel like we are, right now, truly doing it.” (Finally, a way for MoMA to help bring the happy world of Total Recall closer to reality!)
    MoMA itself gets a percentage of the sales of the digital artworks—17 percent of primary sales and 5 percent of secondary. Surely showing “Unsupervised” prominently at MoMA has to be considered as a great ad for the associated line of NFTs that sends profits back to the museum (you can see the spike of trade in them that coincides with the show opening on OpenSea). The curators have been promoting the show with conversations featuring both Anadol and Reas, where they talk as much about NFTs as about the installation.
    It may be that the exact same thing that makes this genre of work commercially appealing for people buying crypto-art—its untroubled techno-philia—is what makes it feel flat to me as an artistic statement. The suspicion that MoMA is incentivized to fast-track this kind of art is going to linger.
    Sadly, the melting of commercial and non-commercial borders strikes me as more prophetic of “what might be to come” in art than any of the images summoned up by the machine in the gallery.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, November 19, 2022–March 5, 2023.
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    The New ICA San Francisco Opens Its Doors With an Artist-Curated Show About Black Women and Freedom

    The Bay Area’s newest institution, the ICA San Francisco, celebrated the final phase of its opening last night, unveiling its biggest gallery space with a compelling group show on the importance of celebrating Black beauty, rest, and self expression, curated by California artists Tahirah Rasheed and Autumn Breon.
    Titled “Resting Our Eyes,” the exhibition features works from both big names and rising stars, with impressive loans by the likes of Carrie Mae Weems, Derrick Adams, Sadie Barnette, Genevieve Gaignard, and Simone Leigh.
    Breon, who lives in Los Angeles, and Rasheed, who is from Oakland, met through the For Freedoms artist collective. (Group cofounder Hank Willis Thomas is among the artists featured in the show, along with his mother, photographer Deborah Willis.)
    “So many people within the network just kept on assuming that we knew each other,” Breon told Artnet News at the exhibition’s opening reception. When they were finally introduced, the connection was instant.
    Curators Tahirah Rasheed and Autumn Breon at “Resting Our Eyes” at the ICA San Francisco. Photo by Vikram Valluri for BFA.
    The two have spent the past year curating “Resting Our Eyes,” which offers a taste of founding ICA director Alison Gass’s socially minded vision for the institution, which looks to focus on under-represented voices in the art world.
    The show’s theme was inspired by the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists who began meeting in 1974.
    “Basically the idea is that if and when black women are free, everyone else in the world will inevitably be free, because the systems that oppress black women would have to be dismantled and everyone else would benefit from it,” Breon said.
    “When T and I started thinking about the mechanisms for freedom, we kept going back to leisure and adornment,” she added. “We were looking for the artwork that tells the story how we adorn ourselves and how we prioritize rest, because we see both of those as really necessary acts.”
    See some of the works from the show below.
    Adana Tillman, Wild Things (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist.
    Gaignard, Look What We’ve Become (2020). Collection of Bob Rennie, Vancouver. Photo by Jeff Mclane, courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter, Los Angeles.
    Sadie Barnette, Easy in the Den (2019).Photo courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
    Hank Willis Thomas, Kama Mama, Kama Binti (Like Mother, Like Daughter) (1971/2008) from “Unbranded: Reflections in Black byCorporate America.” Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. Photo by Aaron Wessling Photography.
    Carrie Mae Weems, The Blues (2017). Collection of Jeffrey N. Dauber and Marc A. Levin. Courtesy of the Dauber/Levin Collection.
    Lauren Halsey, Untitled (2021). Photo by Allen Chen, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
    Traci Bartlow, Girl Boss (1996). Photo courtesy of the artist.
    Helina Metaferia, Headdress 1 (2019). Photo courtesy of the artist.
    Carrie Mae Weems, The Blues (2017). Collection of Jeffrey N. Dauber and Marc A. Levin. Photo courtesy of the Dauber/Levin Collection.
    Ebony G. Patterson, …they wondered what to do…for those who bear/bare witness(2018). Photo courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
    “Resting Our Eyes” is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, 901 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, January 21–June 25, 2023. 
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    In Pictures: A New York Exhibition Celebrates the Delicious History of Jewish Delis, Matzo Balls and All

    Even the offhand mention of a Jewish deli evokes a world of smells and tastes: of hot latkes and matzo ball soup, of briny pickles and piles of pastrami. It’ll make your mouth water.
    So will the New York Historical Society’s current exhibition, “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli.” The show, on view through early April, honors the rich history of the deli in pictures, videos, and relics from restaurants. On view are old photos, menus, and neon signs; vintage uniforms and fake food dishes; even film clips from Seinfeld and When Harry Met Sally (the latter of which inspired the name.)
    And when you inevitably end up craving something to nosh on, well the museum has that too: throughout the run of show, New York’ Historical Society’s restaurant, Storico, is offering deli-themed menu options.
    Reuben’s Delicatessen Menu, 1946. Courtesy of the New-YorkHistorical Society.
    Organized by the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles—where it premiered last year before traveling on to New York—the exhibition posits the deli as a distinctly American phenomenon, one born in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries as waves of Jewish immigrants migrated from Eastern Europe, bringing with them the cuisine of their homeland: cured meats, smoked fish, bagels, and so on. 
    “Whether you grew up eating matzo ball soup or are learning about lox for the first time, this exhibition demonstrates how Jewish food became a cultural touchstone, familiar to Americans across ethnic backgrounds,” said Skirball curators Cate Thurston and Laura Mart—who organized the presentation with food writer Lara Rabinovitch—in a statement. 
    At the show’s center is a universal story about the immigrant experience in America, past and present. 
    It “reveals facets of the lives of Central and Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that echo in contemporary immigrant experiences” the curators went on. “It shows how people adapt and transform their own cultural traditions over time, resulting in a living style of cooking, eating, and sharing community that is at once deeply rooted in their own heritage and continuously changing.”
    Mark Russ Federman’s mother, Anne, serves customers at Russ and Daughters in 1939. Courtesy of the New YorkHistorical Society.
    After the exhibition’s run in New York, it will hit the road again, making stops at in Houston, Texas (May 4–August 13, 2023) and Skokie, Illinois (October 22, 2023–April 14, 2024).
    “I’ll Have What She’s Having” tells a “deeply moving story about the American experience of immigration—how immigrants adapted their cuisine to create a new culture that both retained and transcended their own traditions,” added New-York Historical Society president and CEO Dr. Louise Mirrer.  
    “I hope visitors come away with a newfound appreciation for the Jewish deli, and, with it, the story of the United States.” 
    See more images from “‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’” below:
    Carnegie Deli, New York, NY, 2008. Photo: Ei Katsumata /Alamy Stock Photo. Courtesy of the New York Historical Society.
    Menu from 2nd Avenue Delicatessen, New York City, 1968. Courtesy of the New York Historical Society.
    Lionel S. Reiss, Frankfurter and Lemonade (c. 1945). Courtesy of the New YorkHistorical Society.
    James Reuel Smith, Louis Klepper Confectionary and SausageManufacturers, 45 E. Houston Street, c. 1900. Courtesy of the New YorkHistorical Society.

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    ‘It’s Less Scary, More Attractive:’ Artist Every Ocean Hughes on Her Unflinching Work That Gives People Another View of Death

    Many artists have made work about death, but few have been as close to their subject matter as Every Ocean Hughes. The American artist tackles the subject with humor, sensitivity, and knowledge mined from her training as a death doula. “Alive Side,” Hughes’s new exhibition at the Whitney in New York (on view through April 2), features a trilogy of video and performance works about dying. They are shown alongside a photo series dedicated to Manhattan’s redeveloped west side piers, which have themselves become a metaphor for the death, legacy, and rebirth of the neighborhood surrounding the museum.
    I first encountered Hughes in 2021, when she showed One Big Bag at Studio Voltaire in London. The second in her death trilogy, the single-channel film installation follows performer Lindsay Rico taking the role of doula and talking through her “mobile corpse kit,” with practical tools including water bowls and cotton swabs alongside more creative items such as ceremonial bells.
    Rico’s delivery is captivating, speaking beyond the mechanics of death care to its murky politics, racism within medical practice, and the lack of agency that many face at the end of their life. “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just about a ‘good death’,” Hughes told Artnet News. “There can be so much stress and violence. I have always wanted to make sure I am keeping that in the picture.” 
    The artist decided to learn more about death care after the passing of her grandmother in 2016. She has since taken part in numerous death doula workshops, which teach students about everything from washing dead bodies to caring for the bereaved. 
    “I had some friends die when I was a kid and I always knew that I would have to take care of that at some point as an adult,” she said. “It’s the thing that has impacted me the most as a person. Then my grandmother died. She was my sister, my mother, my best friend. It was the first time I was able to be present. My mum and her friend are nurses and had also been hospice volunteers. They had the physical skills; I kind of slotted into spiritual care.”
    Every Ocean Hughes, still from One Big Bag (2021). Single channel video; 40 min. Courtesy of the artist.
    Her works stand as an encouragement to be more open to death. “It changes your life when you slow down and turn towards death,” she said. “The aim of the writing in these projects is to make it something people want to stay with. When people encounter this knowledge in a performative way, with a creative aesthetic, they are given multiple access points. It’s less scary, more attractive.”
    Help the Dead is a 60-minute 2019 performance. It’s the first in the trilogy that Hughes describes as speaking to the social side of death, where One Big Bag focuses on its material aspects. The two-person performance discusses horrors such as the unofficial “death tax” imposed in funeral homes across the United States for those dying with AIDS at the beginning of the crisis, and the fact that some bodies were buried deeper than usual for fear of contamination. The work balances painful conversation with upbeat melodies and lively performance.  
    “Especially with Help the Dead, I didn’t know which parts viewers would find funny and which they would find hopelessly sad,” she said. “Something disgustingly tragic might be a moment where someone needs to laugh. The choreography in One Big Bag is also to give some relief to the performer. She’s talking about a dead baby: what’s her body doing in that moment? She’s channeling the intensity for the viewer. It’s a very embodied, physical thing we’re talking about.”
    Both works are shown at the Whitney alongside River, a new commission which completes the trilogy, with a focus on the mythic side of death. “I say myth instead of religion, but it’s about the stories we tell,” she says. “Death is the basis of religion and culture.” The performance features a character who can pass between realms.
    “Are we talking about crossing into the underworld, like the Odyssey? Or the first time you go to a gay bar?” she said. “That’s a whole other world too. I’ve always loved that underground, underworld meeting. The character’s defining trait is their exuberance. It’s like when you first come out. Of course, there is anxiety, but you’re also excited about all this stuff you didn’t know about and how much you feel your life will change.” 
    Every Ocean Hughes, The Piers Untitled (2010-2023). Courtesy of the artist.
    Hughes’ photographic series on Manhattan’s west side piers will line the entrance to the show. She started working on the images fourteen years ago and much has changed since for communities who inhabited the area. 
    “I did not have my future gentrification glasses on when I started photographing that place,” she says. “I had been going there from the time that I moved to New York. I then understood that it was important culturally and politically. It’s unrecognisable now. My favourite set of pilings are underneath Little Island, this new development. One of the reasons they keep the pilings there is to protect the decades of polluting sediment that would be stirred up if they were removed. For this show I was thinking about dying, legacy and transitions; you can map those themes onto the gentrification of the Whitney’s neighborhood.”
    Many of Hughes’s works lead back to fear and the resulting barriers that are put up between bodies. This can be felt in her references to AIDS victims buried deep within the ground; in the pilings that hold down sediment while being crushed by new developments; and in the trepidation that many have for touching their loved ones’ dead bodies. Her work is an invitation to look at these things that are kept at arm’s length.
    “When I attended my first workshop, I knew why I was there, but I still felt shocked when she said we were going to wash the body,” she said. “I had the sense it would be toxic, that there’s something bad about the body after death. But where has that come from? Our elders and the generations before them would stay with the body. If you love somebody in life, what does it mean to wash and care for their body after death?”
    “Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side” is on view through April 2 at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York.
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