It was a debut, a big one. But the private preview opening of Art Basel Hong Kong was threatened with a black rainstorm warning, which yielded nothing other than the solid banality of Hong Kong humidity. Inside, relief: the Art Basel HK fair feels like a nineteenth-century crystal palace, spacious,... continue reading

The lust to be a “totalizing eye” immediately sprung to mind when walking into Gabriel Lester’s “The Secret Life of Cities.” It’s one of the key notions expressed in Michel de Certeau’s chapter “Walking in the City” that “the fiction of knowledge is related to [the] lust to be a... continue reading

Anyone who grew up in the 1970s and watched the Children’s Television Network/PBS educational series Sesame Street was subliminally prepared for the gamut of conceptualism in (contemporary) art. No character prepared one better than the “Mad Painter,” who popped up in the unlikeliest of places in his Chaplinesque bowler hat... continue reading

The traditional form of the novel, as we know it since the nineteenth century, seems oddly impervious to change. In comparison to the extraordinary evolutions undergone by art, very little has changed between today’s mainstream fiction and its Balzac, Austen, and James equivalents. Most of the novel’s purported evolutions have... continue reading

For the entirety of the year, Lili Reynaud-Dewar will only make and exhibit bedrooms. Her current exhibition at CLEARING, New York, contains the requisite furniture, though the French artist seems less inclined to follow in the theatricality of Claes Oldenburg’s Bedroom Ensemble (1964) than to meditate on the conditions necessitating... continue reading

“Contemporary art: one, us: zero,” quipped a friend as we mistakenly toured what appeared to be the off-limits back room of Marian Goodman’s booth at Frieze New York. We were looking for Tino Sehgal’s performance Ann Lee. Aware of the nature of Sehgal’s work probing social boundaries through real life... continue reading