In a 1966 review, Rosalind Krauss described how one of Donald Judd’s “progression” wall reliefs pulled the rug from under her. Its intervallic sequence of supporting members suggested a Renaissance colonnade, but its variable spacing negated the compositional and spatial logic that this model prepared her to expect. “The work itself exploits and at the same time confounds previous knowledge to project its own meaning,”[…..]

It is a strange fact that Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Bertolt Brecht all resided in Los Angeles, California, in the 1940s. Unsurprisingly, few of them found their wartime haven a particularly sympathetic milieu. Brecht’s stay was especially ill-fated, ending with his interrogation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and consequent return to Berlin. A decade earlier, the Latvia-born film director[…..]

Startup culture is ripe for satire. The tech industry’s social and economic dominance makes it a necessary target, and its penchant for jargon-heavy, wildly inflated rhetoric makes it an easy one. Mike Judge’s HBO sitcom, Silicon Valley, deftly picks the low-hanging fruit, but it hardly needs to. The elevator pitches of most weak-to-average startups on the venture-capital trail, quixotically ascribing revolutionary potential to the most[…..]

With the recent boom in museum building and expansion, there has been a recurring discussion of what makes a good space for art—as though an objective answer could be determined through a calculation of square footage, flexibility of design, and the ratio of natural to electric light. Indeed, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opted to demolish and rebuild its recently acquired neighboring building,[…..]

“Glitter/Utopia,” “Boring/Because,” “Decade/Asshat,” “Wartime/Paisley”: These are a few of the word combinations that appear in Charles Atlas’ two-channel video projection, Ethel’s Fortune or The Waning of Justice (2015), currently filling two expansive, adjacent walls at Luhring Augustine’s Chelsea location. Each term in the dyad phases into position in front of footage of a maritime sunset while the letters themselves open up similar vistas contained within[…..]

There is a scene in Pierre Huyghe’s shadowy, dreamlike film The Host and the Cloud (2010) in which a woman produces a black rabbit from an unmarked box. No magician, she handles the unexpected animal with a mixture of bewilderment and acute apprehension. Later in the film, she confronts the event during hypnotherapy; then, in a key conversion, she watches her own analysis session performed[…..]

“No, Wade Guyton did not invent a new paintbrush; Anton Perich did in 1978, when Guyton was six.” Thus combatively begins the press release for Anton Perich: Electric Paintings 1978–2014 at Postmasters Gallery. The un-cited author of the claim that “Wade Guyton invented a new paintbrush” is Jerry Saltz, writing on Guyton’s 2012 survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Of course, Saltz was[…..]