Reviews

Going into the large Komar & Melamid retrospective currently at the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers, I already knew the wily, proto-postmodern art style that this artist duo brought with them when they emigrated from the U.S.S.R. at the end of the 1970s. Above all, I knew such calling-card projects as “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” and “The People’s Choice,” characterized by a spirit that is brainy and satirical in a way that at times almost becomes a kind of deadpan wackiness.
But I’m not sure I understood the overall nature of the game. I’m not sure I got that their humor wasn’t just their way of making a serious point, but might well reflect an unnerving skepticism that there were serious points to make.
For me, seeing the twists and turns of the Komar & Melamid corpus surveyed overall (the duo broke up in 2003 and they now work separately) is something like a moment of zooming out from a maze, seeing it from above, and realizing suddenly that there is no way out.
Signing Slogans
The legacy of the Cold War makes the “dissident artist” narrative an appealing hook for any writing on Komar & Melamid. It was certainly part of what made their careers in the States. The catalogue of this show even suggests that the duo’s signature jokes about government propaganda “produced a strong undermining effect on the prestige of Soviet power and advanced its fall.”
This is a bit much. They certainly were stifled by the authorities (they were part of the infamous “Bulldozer Exhibition” of ’74, when authorities demolished an exhibition of non-official art in a park). But an essay in the catalogue for a previous Zimmerli exhibition, Moscow Conceptualism in Context, states plainly that the small independent scene of non-official artists—very much including Komar & Melamid—was “largely invisible to the general public until they started to be exhibited in the West in the early 1980s.” As a consequence, it says, they “should not be equated with the Soviet dissidents, who relentlessly publicly opposed the Communist authorities.”
Komar & Melamid, We Were Born to Make the Fairytale Come True (from the “Sots-Art” series) (1972). Photo by Ben Davis.
Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid met studying at the Stroganoff Art Academy, both graduating in 1967. At the time, a relative thaw let news of developments in Western contemporary art seep through. Komar remembers getting a sense of Conceptual art “based on scattered quotations from Joseph Kosuth and Lucy Lippard” and “Soviet publications that criticized decadent Western movements.” (The crushing of the Prague Spring in ’68 produced a fresh crackdown on information.)
In 1972, Komar & Melamid’s first and still most-generative creation as a duo would be a movement they styled “Sots-Art.” In a nutshell, the idea was to reframe state propaganda in the same way as Pop art reframed ads and comics—a great formula, you have to admit. But whereas Pop art was embraced in the U.S. as a frolicsome affirmation of the vibrancy of the post-war consumer society, Sots-Art remained utterly marginal in its homeland.
Its materially modest vibe reflects this. It is represented in the Zimmerli by a room of funny little paintings, inserting images of the artists and their wives that goof on the idea of Soviet Man and Woman, plus stark white-on-red banners with slogans like “OUR GOAL IS COMMUNISM!” and “WE WERE BORN TO MAKE THE FAIRYTALE COME TRUE.”
The key detail of these latter works is that Komar & Melamid stamped their own names beneath these arid exhortations, transforming them, through the magic of artistic irony, into arch works of word art. The joke, of course, is these kinds of slogans, which were everywhere in the streets, were so aesthetically flat and ideologically hollow that no one would ever want to claim them. (“The paradox consists in the fact that the only slogans that have survived from the Soviet period are slogans that are signed ‘Komar and Melamid,’” Komar remembers wryly.)
Pretty funny! But who, finally, were these subversions aimed at within the tightly controlled civil society of the U.S.S.R.? Melamid puts it bluntly, in an interview printed in the new catalogue: “We were addressing the West. We weren’t talking to the Soviet people.”
All Wrong
The meretricious nature of official Soviet culture is part of any Western observer’s latent understanding of culture behind the Iron Curtain. What’s more interesting to me is how the work of Komar & Melamid also expressed alienation from the imaginable alternatives to state-sanctioned Communist art.
Importantly, in their most generative early-‘70s period, Komar & Melamid were mocking critics not just of official art in Moscow, but also—and maybe especially—of the handfuls of active non-conformist artists (most notably the recently passed Ilya Kabakov) who formed an alternative scene. What makes Komar & Melamid unique is just how deeply they imbibed and embodied the cynicism nurtured in the clunky, bureaucratic world of Breshnev-era Russia during the so-called Era of Stagnation—cynicism that metastasized into a disidentification from any positive ideology for art at all.
Komar & Melamid despised the apartment-bound intellectualism of its non-conformist art scene, with its posture of ethereal spirituality. They mocked spiritual claims for art in works like Circle, Square, Triangle (1975), which took the ideal abstract geometry of the square, triangle, and circle, and presented these with goofy texts advertising their magical healing abilities.
Komar & Melamid, Post-Art #2 (from the “Post-Art” series) (1973). Photo by Ben Davis.
For that matter, remarkably, Komar & Melamid were suspicious of big, optimistic claims about Western art as a progressive force as well. Such a sentiment that finds programmatic expression (almost too programmatic) in their “Post Art” series. Made in the early ‘70s while still working in the hermetically sealed Moscow semi-underground, these depict Pop art works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as flaking, fallen frescos, as if viewed from a future where their glamor had turned to dust.
Men of the Zeitgeist
In the late ‘70s, Komar & Melamid made the jump out of their home country, first to Israel (after a period of being held in bureaucratic limbo) and then to New York, where they continued spinning out new projects at a brisk clip.
There’s a moment in “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” the late Janet Malcolm’s long, biting New Yorker essay on Ingrid Sischy’s tenure as editor of Artforum, in which Sischy takes Malcolm to visit Komar & Melamid’s studio to show her the deeper end of the New York art scene, why it all matters. Here is the passage I always remember:
They start another animated debate, one that soon gets into art theory, the condition of art today, the situation of art in New York. As this argument, too, begins to peter out, Melamid sighs and says, “We sit here, and we talk, and I think, ‘Where is life in all this? Life! Life!’ We go at things obliquely, to the side,” making a gesture of ineffectuality with his hand, “instead of straight, like this,” pounding his fist into his palm. He continues, emotionally, “Last year, I woke up in a hotel room in Amsterdam. There was a woman in my bed. I looked in the mirror and saw that my eyebrows were gray. I saw that I was forty.”
“You got that from Chekhov, you faker,” I say to myself. I am no longer charmed by this pair. I find their performance tiresome, calculated. I look over at Sischy, who is enjoying herself, who thinks they are “great,” and I ponder anew the question of authenticity that has been reverberating through the art world of the eighties.
The assessment is biting. But also, to call Komar & Melamid fakers… well, I can’t help but think that Malcolm didn’t quite get the nature of the phenomenon she was dealing with.
Of course, a New Yorker writer, and the U.S. public in general, wanted from them a performance of Russian intellectualism and dissident authenticity. Perhaps that was a role they were playing for Malcolm and Sischy.
But in Russia, as they themselves remembered, they were known as clowns: “‘It’s a joke, it’s amusing—they’re funny guys—but it’s not art’—that was the general opinion,” Melamid remembers. The lesson that Komar & Melamid brought with them to New York from Moscow was that all postures of artistic authenticity were a pose, a posture, a game.
In general, one of the things the Zimmerli show makes vivid is how Komar & Melamid willfully refused to ever repeat themselves, abandoning each new art-game as soon as they created it. It’s a tic probably to the detriment of building a “Komar & Melamid” art brand—but that was the point in a way: It emerged from how they generalized their contempt for the deadness of the art-ideologies all around them in Moscow into a sense that being committed to any one art-ideology was inherently deadening.
Socialist Un-realism
At the time of the New Yorker article, Komar & Melamid were at the peak of their relevance, with their “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” series launching that year at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. These were adroitly painted, pokerfaced spoofs of the Old Master manqué style of Socialist Realism.
You see, for instance, fatherly tyrant Joseph Stalin being visited by a flowy-haired nude muse tracing the shadow of his profile on the wall. That’s an allusion to the classical myth of the origin of art from Pliny, and the large canvas is called The Origins of Socialist Realism (1982-83).
Paintings from Komar & Melamid’s “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” series. Photo by Ben Davis.
Robert Hughes praised the show in Time for nailing the “correct borsht-and-gravy colors of official Soviet art of 30 years ago.” Yet the truth is, Komar & Melamid’s tenebrous paintings looked nothing much like the sunny romanticism of the classic period of Socialist Realism. Nor did “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” satirize then-contemporary official art in the U.S.S.R., which had adopted the so-called “severe style.”
Basically, this suite of paintings has to be seen as the equivalent of Melamid calculatedly channeling Chekhov’s “The Looking Glass” for Janet Malcolm. “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” is a canny game played with the Cold War U.S. audience’s ideas of Russian art. As with a lot of Komar & Melamid’s work, when you really look into it, its ironies somehow turn back on you for having expected something serious.
Poll Workers
Another example of the same nesting-doll irony: In the 1990s, Komar & Melamid would realize their most-widely known work, “The People’s Choice.” These were paintings based on a series of polls, where they gathered data about the most-liked and least-liked kinds of art from publics in various countries, and then created works that gathered together all the best and worst traits. (By this method, almost all countries end up preferring figurative art where a historical figure is near a body of water, and hating some form of geometric abstraction.)
Study for Komar & Melamid, The People’s Choice: Canada (1995-97). Photo by Ben Davis.
I think of “The People’s Choice” as the ultimate distillation of the best of Komar & Melamid: needlingly funny, possessed of a kind of canny and theatrical cynicism, and inhabiting artistic styles as a series of strategic games.
It hails from the End of History, post-Cold War era. It can be, and has been, read as carrying on a joke about the illusion of a “People’s Art” from Soviet times. But it maybe even works better as being about the globalization of corporate-optimized, focus-grouped market culture in the Neoliberal ‘90s. It is thus a nicely plastic vehicle for the duo’s all-sided skepticism.
But, as with “Nostalgic Socialist Realism,” when you really think about “The People’s Choice” your sense of the exact point that it is making starts to slip away.
Is it about the silliness of mass taste, mocking the comedy of lowest-common-denominator art? Plenty of people read it that way! Or is it, on the contrary, making fun of experts trying to discern the “people’s” taste? After all, the images it conjures of what different national publics might want are clearly based on weird extrapolation and wishful amalgamation.
History Lessons?
You get a feeling that some of the animating specificity of Komar & Melamid’s work vanished as the Cold War context faded into the rear view. A series from 1999 making fun of the tropes of patriotic American art the way they had with “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” doesn’t really land. Meanwhile, once the end of the Soviet Union made “dissident Soviet artists” less of a hot topic, some of the interest in Komar & Melamid vanished as well.
So, what do we do with this body if work now, some two decades after the curtain came down on the Komar & Melamid Show?
The Zimmerli retrospective was originally going to be called “You Are Feeling Good!”, a title that captures their humor (it’s from a slogan they ironically appropriated for one of their first Sots-Art banners). Instead, the exhibition arrived as “A Lesson in History,” with this more sober tone reflecting today’s renewed geopolitical conflict with Putin’s Russia, and the need to pre-address any questions about showing Russian artists by framing their work in relationship to the legacy of totalitarianism.
For myself, I do think that there is a lesson to be drawn from this history, I just don’t think it’s this one.
Asked about final meaning of their work in the catalogue, Melamid volunteers this: “Everything is meaningless.” If the Komar & Melamid corpus resonates now, it won’t really be because it shows us some tradition of heroic satire in Russia. I’d think the better shot would be because people in the U.S. might actually identify with the feeling of being in a world of stagnation, where the ruling ideologies feel arbitrary and senseless, the opposing ones feel cloistered and self-indulgent, and as a consequence the thought that “it’s all a game” becomes more and more seductive.
“Komar & Melamid: A Lesson in History” is on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J., through June 16, 2023. 
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

“What I’m Looking At” is a monthly column where I digest art worth seeing, writings worth consuming, and other tidbits I come across in my quest to absorb the contemporary cultural moment. Below, assorted thoughts from April 2023.

More Pombo, Please!
The most unexpected find this month was at Barro NYC, an art gallery from Buenos Aires with a space in the weird faux New England fishing village-themed mall that is the South Street Seaport. The current show, “Artisanal Conceptualism: Starting Point” (through May 21) features a small selection of deliriously interesting works by Argentine artist Marcelo Pombo (b. 1959).
The centerpiece of the show is the “Dibujos de San Pablo” series he made during a formative trip to Brazil in 1982, a suite of black-and-white drawings featuring duck-billed lovers intertwined and other fantasies of queer beach life strained through a kind of “dirty Disney” look. There’s other good stuff, too, including a trio of delightfully eccentric contemporary abstractions and some dense graphics he made for Sodoma, a magazine put out by an 1980s gay rights collective of which Pombo was a part.
My only complaint: Not enough Pombo! “Artisanal Conceptualism” is too small to render anything like a complete portrait of this artist—but it is just enough to suggest that I would like a complete portrait of this artist.
Drawing from Marcelo Pombo’s “Dibujos de San Pablo” (1982). Photo: Ben Davis.
Marcelo Pombo, Sin título [Untitled] (2023). Photo: Ben Davis.
Display of graphics and flyers by Marcelo Pombo. Photo: Ben Davis.

Catch “Lost” If You Can
I caught Ficre Ghebreyesus’s second show at Galerie Lelong just in time (it’s open through May 6), and am glad I did. The Eritrea-born artist ran a café in New Haven and died in 2012 without having shown a lot of his works. Posthumously, his fame has expanded and he won a plum spot in the Venice Biennale last year. Even when the works might be seen as flirting with folk-art cliches (skeletons, dancers), they have a distinct atmosphere, simultaneously direct and dreamy, sophisticated and rather dashing.
I Believe We Are Lost (2002) gives the show its name, a large work that looks like a banner of some kind, done on unstretched canvas, featuring an uneasy trio of jagged monsters framed in a sea of deep blue. But I really like the allover scrap-quilt style of something like Five Figures with Horse Head (1999), with the richness of its colors and the specificity of its details.
Ficre Ghebreyesus, I Believe We Are Lost (2002). Photo: Ben Davis.
Ficre Ghebreyesus, Five Figures with Horse Head (1999). Photo: Ben Davis.

Rite-On
The back of the Printed Matter bookstore in Chelsea is worth visiting right now for the packed vitrines dedicated to “From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite” (on view through June 21). Founded in in 1973 by the late Edit DeAk (the stuff here comes from her collection), Walter Robinson, and Joshua Cohn, Art-Rite was a free-spirited alternative art publication with a programmatically scrappy style (the title was a play on the budget store Shop-Rite).
Art-Rite was a vehicle for plenty of intense, inventive thinking about the big issues of its day. Here, though, the behind-the-scenes photos of the editors, shown with their stitched-together print layouts and Art-Rite posters and cover art, really do radiate the excitement of an art mag that was a creative project itself. The show makes you remember that covering the art scene should be fun first and a professional obligation second.
“From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite” at Printed Matter. Photo: Ben Davis.
Display of material relating to Art-Rite. Photo: Ben Davis.
Layout for an article in Art-Rite. Photo: Ben Davis.
Clearing Comes Back
Clearing gallery has left Bushwick and is now a stone’s throw from the New Museum in Manhattan. The new space doesn’t have quite the same yawning industrial charm as the Bushwick one. But “Maiden Voyage,” its opening group show (through May 21), makes a pretty convincing case for the gallery with a selection of artists to be proud of. It’s all killer, no filler, down to some delightful seating-options-as-art.
Hugh Hayden, Shadow (2023) and Calvin Marcus, Dead Soldier (2018) in “Maiden Voyage” at CLEARING. Photo by Ben Davis.
Javier Barrios, Contraataque (2022). Photo; Ben Davis.
Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel, Oak bench with cinnabar moths, opium poppy flowers and snails (2021) at Clearing. Photo: Ben Davis.

Fun With Dots
Of things I read this month, the one that stands out in my mind is actually John Elderfield’s two-part opus on the history of dots in Euro-American art in—that’s right—Gagosian magazine. It’s a fun kind of article: an expansive, informed ramble across art history, from how dots were long frowned on in textiles because they reminded people of skin disease to a theorization of the “film mode” versus “surface mode” of dotting.
Georges-Pierre Seurat, Seascape (Gravelines) (1890). Photo: Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images.

Buy It Now!
There’s a Jenny Holzer–themed condom for sale on Ebay. It’s $119.99. The condition says “Used,” but don’t worry, I think they just mean it has been used as art.
Screenshot of Jenny Holzer condom, for sale on Ebay.

A Few Words on NFT.NYC…
Finally, at the beginning of the month I did go back to NFT.NYC, the big crypto-art/crypto-business/crypto-whatever conference that is now held in the Javits Center.
The first time I went to NFT.NYC, in the heady days of 2021, it felt as if everyone was high. It was just at the moment when the drugs were hitting hardest and people are screaming at each other, “We should buy a boat together!!!” Now it feels like everyone has come down and people are kind of looking around at each other and saying, “So…are we still serious about that boat?”
I should say I only went on Friday, the last day of the conference. I can’t speak for the whole thing. Maybe people were tuckered out from the great stuff they saw the previous days. But most of the art talks I went to were attended by the merest smatterings of people.
Don’t get me wrong: I saw plenty of people still trying to make an earnest go of it. Most memorably, I sat in on curator Stacy Engman’s talk, the actual title of which, as printed in the program, was: “Most Expensive NFT Stacy Engman Art History NFT Project—$450 Million NFT Value Pegged to Fine Art Market.” The tone of the Engman’s presentation was much less haywire than that manic word salad. Still—it was hard to figure out what she was selling, and that’s kinda where things are at as a whole.
Sign for NFT.NYC 2023 at the Javits Center. Photo: Ben Davis.
Curator Stacy Engman presents at NFT.NYC. Photo: Ben Davis.
A panel at NFT.NYC 2023. Photo: Ben Davis.
A vendor booth at NFT.NYC 2023. Photo: Ben Davis.
Bored Ape Takes the Stage, Cannot Hold Mic Straight
Some people will tell you that the parties are where the real action is at NFT.NYC. I will have to take their word for it. The one I was invited to this time around, put on by Nolcha Shows at the new immersive art venue known as the ArtDistrict in Williamsburg, billed as “a state-of-the-art, next-level 360-degree visual experience.” In practice this meant that, as at many parties and concerts, it had big light projections all over the walls, except these were from a coterie of NFT artists.
The air of rented decadence was set by the presence of a team of go-go dancers in metal bikinis and capes with lights on them. Partygoers stood around talking about liquidity and fractional lending protocols. There were VIP booths composed of what appeared to be park benches. Someone pitched me on an NFT that would allow me access to a whiskey subscription service.
The big draw here was the debut performance by Shilly, an act from the Bored Ape enthusiast/content creator Shwaz that is built around a Bored Ape avatar. Shilly has so far released two songs, I’m Boring and Elizabeth Holmes, both of which almost rise to level of creative vision and soulful authenticity of Fall Out Boy’s Ghostbusters cover.
I found the atmosphere at this event draining and I did not have the stamina to stick around to watch Shilly strap on his motion-capture helmet to perform in-character as Bored Ape #6722.
I’ve seen the tape though, and I have no regrets. It’s linked below.
A dancer performing. Photo: Ben Davis.
A glamorous VIP table. Photo: Ben Davis.

More Trending Stories:  
A British Couple Bought Two Vases for $10 at a Thrift Sale. They Turned Out to Be Art Nouveau Collectibles Worth 150 Times That 
A Museum Has Renamed a Vegetable Still Life by Van Gogh After a Chef Spotted Something Was Off About the Onions 
An X-Ray Scan of a 16th-Century Bronzino Painting of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici Has Revealed a Mysterious Underlying Portrait 
‘He Was Hungry’: A Korean Art Student Untaped Maurizio Cattelan’s Infamous $150,000 Banana From a Museum Wall and Ate It 
Art Industry News: A Rare Blue Diamond Priyanka Chopra Jonas Showed Off at the Met Gala Could Fetch $25 Million at Auction + Other Stories 
A Low-Key Collector Kept 230 Classic Cars Hidden Away in a Dusty Old Church. The Astonishing Trove Could Fetch Millions at Auction 
Christie’s Neglected to Reveal the Ugly History Behind Its Sensational Planned Jewelry Auction. Then a Billionaire’s Wife Complained 
See the Rare Keith Haring Drawing—Measuring a Massive 125 Feet—That Is Going on View in Amsterdam for the First Time in 30 Years 
How Lavinia Fontana Broke Renaissance Tradition to Become the First Woman Artist Known to Depict Female Nudes—and Earn Equal Pay as Men 
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Here’s my round-up of things I saw or read that were new or notable in the last month.
Tech’s impact on creativity continued to be the big, panicky topic of conversation everywhere, to the point of overload. Just on the level of the discourse, A.I. looms so large that I feel myself repulsed by the subject.
Generative A.I. is already producing such a flood of meaningless visual junk and paranoia that I can feel, in the background of my mind, a new gnawing sense of rooting around for solid meaning. The value of anything connected to an actual history or a sense of place feels like it just went up a notch to me. Family heirlooms, local lore, traditional knowledge, lived-in connection, all of that.
This is all a bit of an aside (I already have a chapter on A.I. Aesthetics and the value of context in my last book, and I am working on trying to say something new for an essay). But I bring it up here because the background might highlight common threads connecting some of the interests I pick out below—from the appeal of the joyful secret worlds of Xiyadie, made with scissors and paper, to the resonance of Decentraland’s decline to cautionary-tale status.

WHAT I’M LOOKING AT
Installation view of “Xiyadie: Queer Cut Utopias” at the Drawing Center. Photo by Ben Davis.
“Xiyadie: Queer Cut Utopias” at Drawing Center
The self-taught artist Xiyadie (a pseudonym which means “Siberian Butterfly”) is a master of Chinese paper-cut art—a fascinating subject all on its own. The 30-odd works here, made in private since the 1980s, deploy that traditional craft to carve out intricate, lovingly detailed scenes of gay trysts and enchanted orgies, fantasies that, we are told, can’t openly be explored in the community where he lives. Bodies mingle together with each other and merge plant-life and dragons and ornaments, in compositions that feel as delicate as snowflakes and as carefully constructed as friezes.
The Verdict: The kind of show that feels both like a secret to defend and a cause to evangelize to everyone you know.

The opening “Manic American Humanist Show” at Public Works Administration. Photo by Ben Davis.
“The Manic American Humanist Show” at Public Works Administration 
Public Works Administration is a fascinating thing: a hole-in-the-wall gallery located improbably in the 50th street 1 stop on the subway, a stone’s throw from the Disney-fied tourist nexus of Times Square. The contextual whiplash works beautifully for this show of disorienting work, curated by Abbey Pusz of the fertile web-culture collective Do Not Research, and featuring four members of the group: Tomi Faison, Filip Kostic, Emma Murray, and Holly Oliver. If I just told you the media in the show included Fornite game mods (Filip Kostic), eerily melting A.I.-generated anime (Tomi Faison), Google spreadsheets (Holly Oliver), and bumper-sticker slogans printed on a mirrored obelisk (Emma Murray), it wouldn’t give you a sense of how intimate and funny and unsettling the show really is.
The Verdict: Move over Dimes Square, Times Square is where the cool kids are at!!

Barbara Ess, Girl in Corner (1997-98). Photo by Ben Davis.
“Barbara Ess: Inside Out” at Magenta Plains
Ess’s art here, made in the 1980s and 1990s using her signature homemade pinhole camera, gave us photos with a recognizable look, fish-eyed and woozy. The specific scenes she captured balance a sense of off-handed reality and metaphorical tension: a little girl in a fort of sheets; a couple kissing in the street; a women having just dropped something on the kitchen floor. An Ess image makes you feel as if you are being seized by a suddenly surfaced memory, but the way a real memory really appears to you: not as a crystal-clear visual document, but as something that surges temporarily into the mind, full of half-articulated emotions and spectral context.
The Verdict: I hadn’t actually seen Ess’s photos before (she died two years ago). Now that I do, I feel like I have been playing with an art-history deck missing one card all along.

OTHER THINGS ON MY MIND

[embedded content]

Magic Spot (2022), directed by Charles Roxburgh
I’ve had a lot of fun arguing recently about the merits of Magic Spot. I found it through Justin Decloux and Will Sloan’s Important Cinema Club podcast, which voted it their favorite movie of last year. It’s a tale of small-town New Hampshire denizens who discover a magic rock in the woods that lets them time travel. If you saw it cold, you’d probably understand it as the film equivalent of a community theater production, a sweet, minor story, full of unabashedly amateur acting from a cast of players who feel like friends (they are—it’s part of a long-running series of ultra-low budget films from Motern Media).
At the same time, Magic Spot can also be valued as a kind of art project about the value of ultra-local creativity. Not having followed these filmmakers like Decloux and Sloan, I maybe don’t find it as engaging as they do. But the more I think about it, the more I appreciate how coherent Magic Spot is as a statement: every seemingly goofy and ramshackle element of the story neatly lines up to make a very sincere and fully developed point.
The comedy is about how a local public-access TV host discovers a magical way to do something with world-altering possibilities—time travel—then puts it to very low-stakes ends: to go back in time and figure out what his girlfriend was wearing on a specific day, as a way to impress her and convince her not to leave their small town for the “big city.”
The way I see it, allegorically, it’s about remembering the value of movie-making as a kind of magic that can hold communities of friends together. And it’s about how really drilling down into these hyper-local values, and appreciating them, you find something that the “big city” of industrial filmmaking can’t replace.
Not every film, even ones that are really profound or really cool, has an effect so activating. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good back story. Magic Spot made me want to round up a bunch of buddies to do my own just-because art project.

[embedded content]

“The Future is a Dead Mall,” Folding Ideas  
From Dan Olson, the YouTube video essayist whose broadside against the NFT scene, “Line Goes Up,” made waves last year, this is a pretty satisfying takedown vein of Decentraland, the crypto-powered online world that was the subject of breathless hype not so long ago. I was always pretty sure Decentraland was not good for art (see my review of the B.20 Museum dedicated to Beeple), and Olson relentlessly catalogs the off-putting landscape it has become, full of abandoned corporate P.R. stunts, icky cartoons, and half-baked schemes (the video’s section on the evolution of the Dentraland Report, an in-universe media company which has received a quarter-million dollars in investment, is particularly scathing).
It’s more than just amusing, though, in that it makes viscerally clear an argument about exactly why the pitch for Decentraland as “the next stage of the internet” never made coherent sense, even for the marketers who were most eager to hop on the hype. Compared to other ways to get the word out, listing info about what you are up to on the internet or on social media really does streamline things for businesses, and for their potential consumers; by contrast, setting up shop in the blockchain-powered cartoon-scape of Decentraland adds huge layers of wonky complexity for no clear reason, and so far, no clear reward.
The only optimistic thing you could say is that Decentraland’s “digital dead mall” vibe is so bleak that it may become, like real dead malls, an object for some artist mining a Robert Smithson-esque ruin-porn vibe.

More Trending Stories:
Archaeologists Studying an Enigmatic Stone Structure in the Saudi Arabian Desert Have Turned Up Evidence of a Neolithic Cultic Belief
A Young Couple in York Renovated Their Kitchen Cabinets and Found 17th-Century Frescoes Painted Underneath
A TikToker Freaked Out When He Found a Painting of His Living Room Displayed in a London Gallery. Here’s How It Ended Up There
A Museum Has Located a Missing Figure That Was Cut Out of This 17th-Century Family Portrait
‘This Is Her Reality’: The First-Ever Biography on Hilma af Klint Unearths How the Swedish Artist Lived, Worked, and Communed With Spirits
Sotheby’s Has Paused Its Latest NFT Auction After an Artist Withdrew His Work in Protest of the All-Male Line-Up
Ai Weiwei Has Recreated Claude Monet’s Iconic ‘Water Lilies’ Using 650,000 Multi-Colored Lego Bricks
London Will Honor the Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade With a New Memorial in the Docklands
In Pictures: See Inside the Museum of Failure, a Touring Exhibition of Historical Product Flops and Tech Misfires
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Inside a Mayfair gallery earlier this week, a gathering of London’s cognoscenti raised colorful textured glasses along a well-appointed table stretching the length of the room. Glamorous as it was, the scene was a typical enough art world gallery dinner, except for the fact that the usual attendees, who included magazine critics and an art historian from the Courtauld gallery, were toasting an artist whose star ascended during NFT mania, and they were clinking glasses across the table with people named things like “blockbird” and “shamrock.”
It was at Unit London, where generative artist Tyler Hobbs was inaugurating his first solo exhibition in the U.K. On view through April 6, “Mechanical Hand” includes three paintings on canvas, and 17 works on paper. Real canvas and real paper, that is. 
Hobbs became a sensation during the NFT bubble in 2021, best known for his highly sought-after “Fidenza” NFTs—a series of 999 algorithmically produced and randomized grids of color. In 2023, he remains a breakout as his market is one of few that appears to have survived the crypto crash. One of these pieces hammered down at Christie’s evening sale in London last week at £290,000 ($348,667). 
But the focus of the evening was definitely on IRL art. The artist, who studied computer science at university, made the works on view using algorithms, codes, and plotters—a sort of robotic arm directed by a computer—to create aesthetic compositions, which he then embellished by hand, either painting or drawing on the surface. 
Tyler Hobbs, Delicate Futures (2022). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Hobbs relates his work to the system-based practices of artists like Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin, who took similarly methodical approaches to mark-making. Speaking to the room, Hobbs said that this type of work “can only be experienced in person.” And while sales of these physical works were indeed encoded on the blockchain, and there were two NFTs also displayed in the gallery on screens, there was little to no mention of the now-poisoned word “NFT.”
This detail didn’t deter the OG NFT collectors from feting Hobbs’s success. “I loved the work, and Tyler’s explanations for each piece made it all the richer,” Hobbs fan and NFT collector, blockbird, told me of the work. “I think this venture into the physical is a great move as it really helps explain and bridge the qualities of his algorithmic work to a new audience. For me as a digital-first collector, it still holds great appeal. I would love one of these in my home.”
And if celebrating, even in a whisper, an NFT artist was unusual for many of the esteemed art world guests, the state of affairs was new to the artist, too, who professed that he had never sat around a dinner table “in the middle of a gallery like this.”
Describing the exhibition, Hobbs said it aims to ask questions about the “adolescent relationship between humans and machines.”
“Computers and machines deeply influence our aesthetics, and I want to observe how that happens,” Hobbs said in a statement. “What implicit skew does the computer have, and what tell-tale signs does the hand leave?” 
The questions lend conceptual depth to the work, as they certainly feel very relevant as algorithm-assisted text and image generators increasingly take over many of our daily tasks, and we collectively ask how we can move forward using a combination of both physical and digital tools. 
Tyler Hobbs, Return One [Red] (2021–2022). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.Of the works on view, the works on paper shone the most. The earthen-toned gouache of Aligned Movement recall an ancient Roman mosaic or an Aboriginal dot painting. The pastel-smeared paper grids appear as if generative art pioneer Vera Molnár had a baby with a Rothko color field. The pale pink and purple hued watercolor of Delicate Futures has something in it of Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stained paintings. The larger works on canvas, such as the primely hung at the back of the room, Return One [Red], are markedly less successful. That one, in particular, I thought looked like a D-version Kusama painting. Like much machine-generated art, it was all very good at looking like something else, and not very good at looking like nothing else. 
But what do I know? Unit London director and cofounder Joe Kennedy told me the following day that the show had “pretty much sold out.” The show at Unit London is the beginning of a landmark season for the artist who will open another solo exhibition later this month at Pace Gallery in New York, coinciding with NFT.NYC. Prices for the works in the show start at £25,000 (around $30,000), going up to £300,000 ($360,000) for the red painting at the back of the room, which had sold to a Hong Kong-based collector by the end of the evening.
“Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” is on view through April 6 at Unit London. See more of the works below.
Detail. Tyler Hobbs, Fulfilling System 1 (2020). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Tyler Hobbs, user_space (2022). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Tyler Hobbs, Aligned Movement (2020). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Tyler Hobbs, By Proxy Yellow 1 (2021). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

The light was back on and jovial chatter was heard again at the corner of Thomas Street in the U.K.’s Manchester this month. After a long hiatus, one of the most prominent centers dedicated to Chinese contemporary art in the west has reopened its doors with a new identity that embraces much wider East and Southeast Asian roots.
Esea Contemporary opened with a group exhibition called “Practise Till We Meet,” which was a demonstration of the center’s determination to start all over again. Featuring an ensemble of ethnically East and Southeast Asian artists presenting bodies of work that explore the diasporic experience, as well as trauma, this modest exhibition is a deliberate move to bid farewell to its past life as the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art.
The venue went through a major overhaul following the art community’s allegations of institutional racism (the center’s former management team and its board of trustees was dominated by white names) that nearly got the non-profit defunded. But some are not sure the institution has gone far enough.
“Practise Till We Meet” (2023) installation view, at Esea Contemporary. Photo courtesy Jules Lister.
The launch event also coincidentally coincided with the re-opening of the Manchester Museum after a £15 million ($18 million) facelift, which now includes the U.K.’s first permanent gallery dedicated to South Asian art. Although London remains the largest home to Asians, according to a 2021 census, the region that encompasses Manchester also has one of the highest presence of Asian populations in the U.K. Asians, including Chinese and other Asian ethnicities, are among the second biggest ethnic groups in Manchester.
The selection of works and artists in Esea’s debut show “Practise Till We Meet,” curated by the Guangzhou-based independent curator Hanlu Zhang, can be interpreted as a statement for the center’s direction. Although most of the works on show are not new, they address current, unresolved issues facing many in the Asian diaspora.
Koki Tanaka, Vulnerable Histories (A Road Movie) (2018), commissioned by Migros Museum of Contemporary Art. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jules Lister.
Memorable works include Koki Tanaka’s Vulnerable Histories (A Road Movie) (2018), a multi-channel video installation that charts the discrimination, violence, and trauma experienced by the Korean diaspora in Japan, descendants of Korean migrants who came to the country during various wars. The honest discussion about their psychological struggle with their hybrid identities is particularly moving.
A colorful series of photos—Matter Out of Place (2017-2018), Souvenir (2018), Unhide Diego Garcia (2018)—by the Manchester-based Audrey Albert, a native of the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, who has Chagossian origins. With these poignant works, she introduces the audience to the lesser known history about her displaced roots.
Isaac Chong Wai, Two-Legged Stool (2023), commissioned by Esea Contemporary. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jules Lister.
Liu Weiwei’s mixed media project Australia (2017) tells the story about the artist’s younger brother Liu Chao, who is adamant about emigrating to Australia. Although the project was created nearly six years ago, Liu Chao’s determination to leave his native China echoes today amid the recent “run movement” in the country, which is seeing Chinese people fleeing their home country.
Berlin-based Hong Kong artist Isaac Chong Wai presents Two-Legged Stool (2023), the only new work commissioned by Arts Council-backed Esea Contemporary. The work, which creates an optical illusion of a stool that appears to be two-legged from one angle, and three-legged from another, references the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s remarks about the complicated relationship between China, the U.K., and Hong Kong. “There have been talks of the so-called three-legged stool. [There are] not three legs, only two legs,” he had noted. The work is shown alongside Chong’s acclaimed video series Rehearsal of the Futures: Is the World Your Friend? (2018), which depicts the slow body movements seen in protests and the police’s tackle of demonstrators.
While the show attempts to serve as a platform for diverse narratives, and while efforts have been made to be inclusive (the curator’s statement in Chinese is printed in traditional Chinese characters, which are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, rather than simplified characters adopted in mainland China), some members of the East and Southeast Asian communities in the U.K. that Artnet News spoke with remain skeptical about the center’s re-launch.
A viewer admiring Audrey Albert’s work Matter Out of Place on show at exhibition “Practise Till We Meet” at Esea Contemporary. Photo: Jules Lister.
The new Asian presence in the institution’s leadership appears to include members who are predominantly of Chinese heritage. “What about the representation of other cultures from East and Southeast Asia on the management level? I would prefer to wait and see what they are going to do next,” said one Manchester-based East Asian culture practitioner who declined to be named.
In response to such concerns, an Esea Contemporary spokesperson said they “welcome the community’s engagement and reflection to help us achieve what we are setting out to construct: a platform for the ESEA art community at large.”
“We plan to work with a diverse range of guest curators across future projects, as well as continuing efforts to grow our board of trustees, staff team and artistic advisory panel,” the Esea spokesperson told Artnet News.
There is reason for optimsim; the center’s director Xiaowen Zhu is busy cooking up big plans for the coming year. Two more shows have been planned, and she is looking into diversifying the center’s programming to include more live, in-person events.
“No terminology is perfect in terms of representation. We hope we are doing the right thing. We are also figuring things out along the way,” said Zhu. “People’s excitement and curiosity are definitely very encouraging for us.”
More Trending Stories:
Whoops! A Clumsy Art Fair Visitor Shattered a $42,000 Jeff Koons Balloon Dog Sculpture in Miami
Art Industry News: A Secret Deal on a ‘Hybrid’ Repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles Is Underway + Other Stories
A 1,100-Year-Old Hebrew Bible, Missing Only a Few Chapters of Genesis, Could Fetch Up to $50 Million at Auction
Here’s What We Know About ‘Moss and Freud,’ the Upcoming Film About the Friendship Between Kate Moss and Lucian Freud
Archaeologists Digging in Iraq Have Located the Remains of a 5,000-Year-Old Tavern—As Well as a ‘Beer Recipe’
Art Industry News: Native American Activists Urge Developers to Stop Digging at Archaeological Site in Miami + Other Stories
An Ornament of a Baby, Purchased for $2 by a Bargain Hunter, Turns Out to be a Rare Porcelain. It Could Earn $36,000 at Auction
Valuations: Zuzanna Ciolek, Director of UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles, on Underrated Artists and Overrated Luxuries
See the Majestic Shots of Dolphins, Whales, and Stingrays That Won a Major Underwater Photography Competition
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

In Billy Sings Amazing Grace (2013), Theaster Gates, renowned archivist and lesser-known vocalist, wails and croons in a darkened auditorium alongside the white-haired and stoic soul singer Billy Forston. In its profound sonic resonance, their video performance of improvisational gospel is one of many highlights in “Thinking Historically in the Present,” the recently opened 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial.
Like the show as a whole, the piece is a work of intimate, visceral storytelling, in both mournful and celebratory turns. Featuring about 300 works from more than 150 artists and collectives, including 70 new commissions, the excellent “Thinking Historically” is biennial director Hoor Al Qasimi’s homage to the late and well-loved Okwui Enwezor, who was originally appointed curator before his passing in 2019.
In her catalog essay, Al Qasimi reflects on Enwezor’s groundbreaking decolonial legacy, citing his 2002 approach to Documenta 11 as “a lodestar in my curatorial consciousness.” Validating artists outside the canon’s narrow purview, his work had offered her a glimpse into a wider world of possibilities, unhindered by “the social myopia” of Eurocentrism.
Theaster Gates’s Billy Sings Amazing Grace (2013). Photo: Janelle Zara
Nodding to Enwezor’s decentralization of Documenta 11 across five cities, the Sharjah Biennial spans five towns across the emirate, in venues that include the polished galleries of the capital city, and the peeling classrooms of a disused kindergarten along the coast.
A full generation since Enwezor’s groundbreaking exhibition in Germany, the participating biennial artists contend with what are now-familiar themes: the aftermath of empire, foreign extraction, and slavery among others. 
“Thinking Historically” is a welcome antidote to the academic tropes of recent biennials, some of which, like the Berlin and Istanbul Biennials in 2022, were filled with research-based projects with few formal merits. In the rich textures of works like Ibrahim Mahama’s monumental tapestry, A Tale of Time/Purple Republic (2023), or the gnarled, blackened branches of Doris Salcedo’s Uprooted (2020-2022), form is the defining feature, not an afterthought in service to a predetermined message. (Their scale, which is grand, also indicates just how well-funded this biennial is.) 
Ibrahim Mahama’s A Tale of Time/ Purple Republic (2023) Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 15, Kalba Ice Factory (2023). Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Motaz Mawid
Like many biennials, Sharjah’s exhibition is video-heavy, ranging from the heart-wrenching simplicity of Erkan Özgen’s Wonderland (2016), a searing account of the Syrian Civil War, to the sumptuousness of Isaac Julien’s immersive black-and-white cinematic installation, Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022). The show’s weaknesses lie in concept-forward paintings that suffer from a lackluster handling of paint, or photographs of state-inflicted strife that rest too comfortably in a photojournalistic lane. There is notably little, if any work that directly addresses Emirati exploitation of migrant labor.
Yinka Shonibare’s Decolonised Structures (2022), a series of British imperial statues cloaked in the Dutch wax patterns of West African fabrics, succinctly captures the limits of a now-rote approach to dismantling the West. While its cosmetic intervention sits on the surface, the colonial legacy remains underneath, whole and untouched. 
Other artists have moved beyond centering the colonizer, aspiring to deeper points of introspection. In Nosferasta (2022), a comically absurd and brilliantly acted 32-minute feature, artists Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer, and the Rastafarian musician Oba frame colonization as a profoundly internalized malady, frequently perpetuated by the colonized themselves. For their Rastafarian protagonist, colonization is akin to vampirism, and Christopher Columbus is a literal vampire. The true villain of this story, however, is the fraught pursuit of assimilation.
Doris Salcedo’s Uprooted (2020-2022). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Juan Castro Photoholic
The assimilation theme recurs in various acts of self-erasure, including the portrait series Léthé (2021), in which photographer Mama-Diarra Niang beguilingly dissolves her subjects’ distinguishing features into a smooth, faintly recognizable haze.
In the video As British as a Watermelon (2019), Zimbabwean-born, British-based artist mandla rae shares shamed confessions, including the origins of scars both physical and mental, and the self-erasure of mispronouncing one’s name for European ears. “How colonized do you have to be to look at an African baby and call it Bridget?” they ask, handling the titular fruit with alternating tenderness and disquieting brutality. 
Echoing Al Qasimi’s commemorative sentiments, homages to beloved predecessors abound, in monuments and imaginary museums, or Isaac Julien’s protagonist, captivatingly written as a composite of philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke and literary heroes Langston Hughes, Aimé Césaire, and James Baldwin. Throughout, the refusal of erasure amounts to asserting one’s place in history; it is honoring lineage, especially the legacies that the official record elides.
Isaac Julien’s Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022). Photo: Janelle Zara
Gabriela Golder’s surprisingly charming Conversation Piece (2012) is ostensibly a tribute to the artist’s mother, veiled in the cool irony of two 10-year-olds reading The Communist Manifesto. “What does the bourgeoisie have to do with the discovery of America?” they ask their grandmother, Golder’s mother and former militant of the Argentine Communist Party. Her response exudes a commanding wisdom as she gently and convincingly dismantles the myth of discovery. 
These works stop just short of excessive sentimentality, arguably the Sharjah Biennial’s most compelling feature. Sentimentality eschews drier forms of institutional critique, which lately feel expressly designed as punitive history lessons for white audiences. Rather than attempt to solve the ills wrought by centuries of empire, artists here lean into art-making as a restorative, generative process, one more adept at asking questions than answering them. 
My personal favorite works tap into spiritual traditions, as in Gates’ wailing hymnal, or Carrie Mae Weems’ The In Between (2022-2023), a shrine that features a small library of Enwezor’s books and a vessel that appears to sail into the afterlife. Michael Rakowitz’s Borrowed Landscape (30.3193 ° N, 48.2543 ° E) (2023) was ostensibly a large-scale, loose reinterpretation of the Passover Seder, performed in a dust-blown field of decapitated palms in the desert town of Al Dhaid.
Michael Rakowitz’s Borrowed Landscape (30.3193 ° N, 48.2543 ° E) (2023). Photo: Janelle Zara
As Rakowitz read from an iPad to a crowd of several hundred people, he passed around objects culled from eBay that recalled the long-lost belongings of his family. Its simplicity was decidedly polarizing, but the performance struck me as a moving dedication to histories one can no longer access. The title’s coordinates refer to a site in Iraq where his family’s date trees stand similarly mangled as the palms that surrounded us.
The artist designated this site as “a place to contemplate another,” speaking of the hyphen as metaphor, a suture between disparate points, but also between the “irreconcilable binaries” of his identity as an Iraqi Arab-Jew. He ended the piece with the biblical task of supplying an enormous crowd with roasted fish—masgouf, a national Iraqi dish dating back 3,000 years. When denied the right to return, to speak one’s history aloud and to share it with others is what keeps it alive.
The Sharjah Biennial is on view until June 11, 2023.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Well, one month of 2023 already gone. I started the year with a New Year’s Resolution to write a bit more about art outside of the automatically must-cover big shows or controversies. That’s hard—every pressure of media life pushes towards becoming a brain in a vat plugged directly into trending topics.
But I do want to try! Despite the general bad vibes of our moment, people go on doing and saying interesting things and trying to figure it all out. We’ll see how the year goes. In the meantime, here are a few things I saw and liked, or read and felt worth recommending, in the last weeks.

Things to See
Work by Leonor Fini at Kasmin. Photo by Ben Davis.
Leonor Fini at Kasmin
Leonor Fini (1907-1996) is a Surrealist great, and also one of those figures who has been greatly under-appreciated. I mean, just a few years ago, it took New York’s Museum of Sex to give her a first big American retrospective. More recently, the Argentinian-Italian artist’s star has been ascendant, with her declaration that she wanted to be seen as a “witch rather than as priestess” making her perfect for the feminist-Surrealist vibe of the recent Venice Biennale. Kasmin’s mini-survey has Fini’s numinous, libidinal paintings accompanied by her theatrical self-made outfits, freaky masquerade ball masks, and even a pair of clip-on gold devil horns. The show contains magic, maybe in metaphorical and non-metaphorical ways.

Installation view of Alfatih, “Day in the Life,” at Swiss Institute. Photo by Ben Davis.
Alfatih at Swiss Institute
The Switzerland-based new media artist’s slick, strangely engaging black-and-white digital animation in the basement of the S.I. centers on the doings of a seemingly super-intelligent cartoon baby, looping endlessly through different permeations of daily domestic rituals (cooking, taking a bath) within the confines of some kind of stylish domestic purgatory. If someone told me that I would be moved by something best described as—I dunno—“Yoshitomo Nara meets Spielberg’s A.I.” or “Limbo meets Boss Baby,” I wouldn’t believe them. But that’s why you don’t judge an art show based on pithy little riffs like that. A vignette where the enigmatic child plinks at the piano as rain pours and lightening strobes all around continues to circle in my brain long after I have left the cartoon creature to carry on with its own devices. More

“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.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More