Simon Denny. All You Need Is Data: The DLD 2012 Conference REDUX Rerun, 2013; installation view, Petzel Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

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 banal of products, all but ridicule themselves (at least to people outside of the industry). This raises the question: Given an industry that already trades in hyperbole, is satire still an effective strategy for cutting through ideology?

The art world allows for more nuanced and challenging modalities of representation than mainstream media outlets like HBO do. The artist Li Liao, for example, took a job at the notoriously exploitative Foxconn factory in China, which produces parts for Apple products, and then exhibited his uniform, ID card, labor contract, and an iPad—the object of his labor—as a work titled Consumption (2012). While not offering much to look at, Li’s work succeeds in concretizing an experience on the production side of the technology industry, images of which can be hard to believe. Taking another perspective, Simon Denny’s exhibition The Innovator’s Dilemma, now at MoMA PS1, trains its gaze on the rhetoric of startup culture, which the artist shows to be itself one of the industry’s most important products, albeit an ethereal one. Denny’s work could easily register as satire, but it is not. It holds up a mirror, the effect and purpose of which are not easy to ascertain.

Simon Denny. Berlin Startup Case Mod: Rocket Internet, 2014; custom computer case, packaging, heavy-duty computer hardware, digital prints on Plexiglas, custom Plexiglas components, metal fittings, Samsung UE40F6500 SS, video on USB stick, and custom spider computer case; 42 1/8 by 36 5/8 by 21 5/8 in., 30 11/16 by 31 1/2 by 12-3/16 in. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

The Innovator’s Dilemma includes four installations, each made to look like a trade-show platform—an appropriate type for representing the international echo chamber of startup discourse. All You Need Is Data (2013) arrays several dozen canvas posters representing events from the 2012 Digital Life Design (DLD) conference, an event held annually in Munich. Capturing the skeuomorphic aesthetic of Apple’s then-current operating system, iOS 5 (since replaced by the iconographically flatter iOS 7 and iOS 8), the posters pair photographs of leading industry personalities with associated pull quotes (“We are hard-wired to share,” says Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb). In Disruptive Berlin (2014), Denny creates modest monuments to that city’s top ten startups (as named by Wired UK in 2013). His sculptures consist of tricked-out desktop computers placed atop horizontal flat-screen monitors looping promotional videos from the associated companies, accompanied in some cases by spastic dubstep music. The Personal Effects of Kimdotcom (2013), meanwhile, re-creates a number of the assets seized by the U.S. government after its arrest of Kim Schmitz, the founder of the streaming sites Megavideo and Megaupload, including a server stack, a life-size model of the creature from the Predator films, and an artistic monument to Schmitz’s skills in the Call of Duty video game.

Simon Denny. New Management, 2014; installation view, Portikus, Frankfurt. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Helena Schlichting.

These works leave the viewer at something of a loss regarding Denny’s stance, aesthetic or political, regarding the material he displays. The quotations in All You Need Is Data may register below the hagiographic pitch typically adopted toward industry gurus at conferences like DLD, but not so much that they read as snide or ridiculing. Rather, they seem a more or less accurate distillation of what the actual events entailed; they could even pass for DLD promotional stock. Likewise, while the “monuments” in Disruptive Berlin have a touch of silliness, they could conceivably function as the trophies they purport to be, thus calling into question what would appear to be their irony. The Kimdotcom platform, for its part, strictly avoids passing judgment on its figure. What, then, are we to make of this rather noisy, banal trade-show environment, transferred to the context of an art museum? What is its raison d’être?

A potential answer comes in the form of Denny’s fourth platform, New Management (2014), which selectively re-creates the Frankfurt hotel room where, in 1993, the former Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee famously declared a set of new management principles intended to make his company a more internationally competitive player. The enactment of these principles proved an enormous success, but the hyperbolic, revolutionary cadence of Lee’s speech—often recalling the platitudes of a self-help guru (“Change everything but your wife and kids” is the most famous maxim to come out of it)—is what most anticipated startup culture, which was then still several years away. Denny’s installation highlights the discrepancy between the grandiosity of Lee’s rhetoric and the cheap accoutrements of the room in which he presented it, gesturing to the fact that the speech rings hollow only to outsiders. For the audience to whom it was directed, it was and indeed remains gospel.

New Management suggests that Denny intends to work in a historical mode. Indeed, while the other three installations concern subjects nearer to the present time, they all present artworks as though they were artifacts or archival material, with what I read as a kind of devious quasi-objectivity. They reveal that, just as the tech industry must constantly renew its product lines, so it must renew its discourse and image, with the result that these ethereal attributes often escalate to ever loftier, often laughable heights. Indeed, if there is one thing that The Innovator’s Dilemma makes apparent, it is how much the look of tech has changed even since 2013. Just two years later, the skeuomorphic graphics, the dubstep, and the unimpeachable popularity of Call of Duty all read as distinctly, terminally passé. Evidently for Denny, to present these phenomena in all their brash irrationality is itself a worthwhile artistic gesture, and to take an explicitly defined stance, whether critical or satirizing, would be superfluous.

The Innovator’s Dilemma was on view at MoMA PS1 through September 7, 2015.

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Jeff Koons. One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr. J 241 Series), 1985; glass, steel, sodium chloride reagent, distilled water, basketball; 64 3/4 x 30 3/4 x 13 1/4 in. (164.5 x 78.1 x 33.7 cm.). Collection of B. Z. and Michael Schwartz. © Jeff Koons.

At the press preview for Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, more than one member of the Whitney Museum’s curatorial staff urged visitors to dispense with “preconceived notions” about Koons and embrace the exhibition as an opportunity to view the artist’s perhaps too-well-known oeuvre with fresh eyes. One of the largest retrospectives the Whitney has ever mounted, Jeff Koons sprawls across three floors in ascending chronological order, lucidly mapping the artist’s career as he progressed from wunderkind art-school grad, to cultural provocateur, to the Mylar man we have known and either loved or hated for past twenty-odd years.

Those who revile Koons often do so on the basis of his later works, like Balloon Dog (or, more recently, Balloon Venus of Willendorf), the production and sale values of which have soared while their meaning has seemingly become ever more surface-deep. Admirers, meanwhile, employ a modernist-inflected rhetoric of materiality and monumentality to elevate this work on much of the same bases. Wall text at the Whitney describes how Cat in a Cradle required Koons to push the limits of a worldwide network of specialist plastic fabricators, suggesting that the work owes the “sense of wonder” it supposedly inspires to this insistence on medium and scale. On similar grounds, New York Times reviewer Roberta Smith hails Play-Doh (1994–2014), a towering mound of brightly colored globs that uncannily resemble the matte tackiness of the titular children’s putty, as an “almost certain masterpiece.” Those who agree with such a statement will be delighted by the playground of huge, shiny, pneumatic-looking things that is the Whitney’s top floor. Those inclined to see Play-Doh as little more than a colossal waste of time and money may find a surprising protagonist two floors down: Koons circa 1985. Believe it or not, Koons’ artistic practice was once pointedly critical and anything but insular. Jeff Koons: A Retrospective is most interesting (and encouraging) when it reminds us of this.

Of Koons’ earlier works, One Ball Equilibrium Tank, a basketball miraculously suspended in a tank of water, has certainly become the most iconic in the modern sense: The image has circulated so widely, little of its original meaning remains intact. Abstracted from its original context, the work may read as a prefiguration of the artist’s later obsessions with curvaceous form and the pursuit of perfection. (He reportedly recruited a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to determine the water salinity necessary to suspend the ball at the tank’s exact midpoint without it rising or sinking.) Such a reading would be accurate but woefully incomplete, for the work’s meaning is in fact inextricable from the other pieces that Koons exhibited along with it, many of which are assembled in the retrospective.

Jeff Koons. Board Room, 1985; framed Nike poster; 31 1/2 x 45 1/2 in. (80 x 115.6 cm.). JPMorgan Chase Art Collection. © Jeff Koons.

For one, the Equilibrium exhibition of 1985—Koons’ first solo show—included a series of unaltered Nike posters that humorously present famous basketball players in the garb of more conventionally respectable professions: Darrell Griffith becomes “Dr. Dunkenstein” by donning a white lab coat; a team dressed in dark suits gathers at a long courtside table dubbed “The Board Room.” Picking up on the predatory nature of the ads, Koons intelligently identified these figures as “sirens” promising an alternative form of social mobility to a mostly African American consumer base whose actual mobility was far from buoyant. Giving macabre form to this inference is a series of painstakingly detailed sculptures of floatation devices, such as a lifeboat and a scuba vest, ironically cast in bronze. Though they seem to offer salvation, they would in fact sink the user like a stone. The iconic Equilibrium Tank thus reveals itself as integral to a concerted critique of racially driven aspirational marketing. As such, it resonates as poignantly in today’s milieu of data mining and social-media-fueled ad targeting as it did in the Reagan era.

Social critique was more than a passing interest for Koons. In his Luxury and Degradation series, next on display at the Whitney, high-end liquor advertisements printed on canvas accompany sets of barware alluringly cast in stainless steel—what Koons referred to as “proletarian platinum”—to lay bare the class-based manipulations in alcohol advertising. Even Koons’ increasingly extravagant work of the late 1980s, by which point the artist had seemed to embrace a startling relativism (“…everybody’s cultural history is perfect, it can’t be anything other than what it is—absolute perfection”), can be seen as a continuation of this interrogative strain. One could even argue that Koons’ culture criticism reached its apex with his landmark Banality series, which presented kitsch, knickknack-style objects like Michael Jackson and Bubbles at an anthropomorphic scale, and his notorious Made in Heaven series, which frankly depicted the artist having sex with then-girlfriend Ilona Staller (aka La Cicciolina) at her pornography studio. Just as Equilibrium Tank was not merely a transcendental meditation on the embryonic, so these series may not be merely an “affirmation” of low culture. By boldly leveraging his art-world celebrity status to transform the kitsch and the pornographic into coveted art objects—a risky move that nearly ruined his career—Koons forced bourgeois viewers and buyers to reckon with their own “taste,” exposing the construct as a fundamentally oppressive instrument designed to induce shame and reinforce social divisions.

Jeff Koons. Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988; porcelain; 42 x 70 1⁄2 x 32 1⁄2 in. (106.7 x 179.1 x 82.6 cm.). Private collection. © Jeff Koons.

None of Koons’ work from 1994 onward has presented anything remotely as challenging. It is a pity that the Whitney stacks its cards the way it does, allocating an entire floor—its largest one—to this slick, repetitive lot and presenting it within a plainly valorizing, less-than-enlightening discourse about Koons’ meticulous attention to form, materials, and surface. It is clear enough how the mystique of the levitating basketball evolved throughout this artist’s career into the mountain of Play-Doh we now see before us. It is less evident what happened to the critical posture in which Equilibrium Tank was embedded. That is the question for anyone looking to jostle their “preconceived notions” about this peculiarly American artist. Whatever the cause of this loss, it arrived all too soon.

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective runs through October 19 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Taner Ceylan. 1881, 2010; oil on canvas; 55 1/8 x 70 7/8 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

Taner Ceylan’s Lost Paintings series, marking the Turkish artist’s first New York solo exhibition since joining the roster of Paul Kasmin Gallery, makes for a suitably impressive debut. Begun in 2010, it consists of ten stunningly detailed hyperrealist paintings, each of which alludes to a particular figure from Turkish history or the canonical Western depictions thereof. Ceylan here aims to upset the attendant nationalist/Orientalist narratives and revivify their subjects with frank, often non-heterosexual eroticism. In 1640, the title of which refers to the year of Sultan Murad IV Ghazi’s death, a slender, young slave washes the thigh of his burly, bearded master—a reference to the acceptance of such asymmetrical homosexual relationships throughout Turkish history, and the brutal Ghazi’s documented predilection for them in particular. 1881, a reference to the birth year of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, captures the lusty and defiant stare of a fez-clad man who suggests the Republic of Turkey’s revolutionary patriarch, as cigar smoke curls around his lips.

Prior to the Lost Paintings, Ceylan was largely producing work with decidedly more explicit sexual content. Many of these depictions are straightforwardly tender. Others, like Taner Taner, a self-portrait of the artist entering his double from behind, are more provocative; they seem to betray a naughty glee in monumentalizing images that many viewers, especially in Turkey, would find taboo (curator Dan Cameron notes how the sexual dimension of Ceylan’s work has, unsurprisingly, “brought him outright abuse in the press”). Abstraction of Nothing, Ceylan’s 2009 exhibition at I-20 Gallery—his first U.S. solo show—found the artist flirting with outright vulgarity. One work depicts a group of men pouring champagne on a kneeling woman as she fellates one and manually stimulates another; in another, a cropped penis rests on a semen-splattered close-up photograph of fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Taner Ceylan. 1640, 2010; oil on canvas; 84 ¼ x 54 5/8 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

Ceylan’s sudden transition from this X-rated jamboree to the bookishness and more widely permissible eroticism of Lost Paintings demands consideration. One explanation could involve a desire to craft more directly political images in view of ongoing battles over Turkish identity and heritage, such as the recent demonstrations in Taksim Square, about which Ceylan has been very vocal on his Twitter. At the same time, it is hard not to interpret Ceylan’s rather severe pivot as a bid for greater art market traction—especially considering its coincidence with the artist’s joining a blue-chip Chelsea gallery. Indeed, the exhibition’s catalog seems to reveal self-censorship in the production of some works. The photo shoot for Esma Sultan, for instance, included a tableau of the subject—a model portraying an 18^th century princess famed for her cruel disposition—digging her heel into a supine man’s naked thigh. The resulting portrait, however, depicts her only from the collarbone up, excising the blatant sexuality that characterized Ceylan’s earlier work in favor of a complex visage, registering something between compassion and authority.

Taner Ceylan. Esma Sultan, 2012; oil on canvas; 70 7/8 x 67 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

It would be unfair to denounce on principle Ceylan’s possibly strategic turn toward a less outré aesthetic. After all, the Esma Sultan that we get is likely more interesting than the dominatrix she might have been. Still, one hopes that the artist’s newfound maturity, if you will, will not dry out his subjects. After all, the Lost Paintings owe their impact not to their historical and art historical allusiveness alone—though this has dominated the discourse about them so far, forming the basis of an entire catalog—but rather to the tension between this and their patently modern aesthetic. The latter announces itself in the Louis Vuitton tiling that forms the background of Spring Time, and manifests more subtly in the evident camera lighting that Ceylan so faithfully renders on the subjects’ faces, pore by reflective pore, effectively avowing the paintings’ photographic origins. This aesthetic, evocative of a publicity shoot, fashion spread or other such mass media token, confers striking presence and immediacy to Ceylan’s historically distanced subjects. A touch of vulgarity remains, and it’s hard to imagine these works having much political charge without it.

Taner Ceylan’s Lost Paintings will be on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery through October 26.

Mike Kelley, now at MoMA PS1, is massive. The largest retrospective of the artist’s work to date, it is comprehensive perhaps to a fault, filling each of the exhibition space’s four floors to capacity and arguably beyond. The former school building’s multiple stairwells allow for various paths through the exhibition—a feature that is liberating if potentially disorienting—but the overall impression is one of totality; of a lifetime of practice gathered together and laid out for inspection. Even after several hours navigating the show with the aid of a floor plan, I’m not confident I saw everything, but in any case, I had had enough.

Mike Kelley. Day Is Done, 2005; installation view, 2013. Courtesy of MoMA PS1. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

This is to say that the show is taxing, partly because Kelley’s art is itself often stress-inducing, concerned as it is with giving stage to images of trauma and giving form to anxieties that society would otherwise repress—and doing it with a fierce impudence and black humor that has been aptly classified as punk. To be sure, this disdain for the polished and the decorous is what makes Kelley so outstanding as an artist, and Mike Kelley deserves praise for including so many of his hard-to-stage projects. Take, for instance, his quixotically ambitious Day Is Done video installation series, which sets out to stage twisted “repressed memories” purportedly lurking beneath 365 high-school yearbook photos of extracurricular activities. Here we encounter twenty-five of the thirty-two completed installments together in one rich, cacophonous gallery.

Where the exhibition comes up regrettably short, however, is in opportunities to actually reflect on the career, tragically ended by Kelley’s suicide last year, that is so thoroughly on display. To what do Kelley’s lacerating meditations amount? For someone not already long acquainted with the artist’s practice, this retrospective, profuse as it is with examples, provides precious few opportunities to formulate a response.

The ground level contains Kelley’s canonized Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, a room-filling installation of soiled stuffed animals suspended from the ceiling in celestial agglomerations, surrounded by brightly colored, wall-mounted canisters that periodically release a deodorizing spray. The themes of sterility and decay at work pervade Kelley’s oeuvre, but the form here is uncharacteristically innocuous. Similarly unrepresentative, and occupying most of the first floor’s large remainder, are Kelley’s Kandor series, begun in 1999: large sculptures of Superman’s shrunken home planet, which, the story goes, the superhero keeps in a glass jar hooked up to atmosphere stabilizers. Conceptually evocative of environmental cataclysm or bodies on life support, while frequently phallic or otherwise genital, Kelley’s Kandors palpably materialize a tangle of anxieties, perhaps latent in the comics, that recur throughout the artist’s practice. The sculptures’ alluringly slick, candy-coated surfaces are a far cry from the aesthetic of scrappy appropriation and lo-fi video that largely characterized Kelley’s pre-Gagosian years.

Mike Kelley. Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, 1991/1999; installation view, 2013. Images courtesy of Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com.

Upstairs, one encounters a number of similarly vast and impressive projects. Notables include Pay for Your Pleasure, a corridor lined with portraits of famous intellectuals, each paired with a quote relating art and criminality, that begins with a donation box for the victims of violent crime and culminates with an artwork by an imprisoned local murderer; Black Out, a sprawling collection of works reflecting on the artist’s hometown of Detroit, completed in honor of the city’s 300th anniversary; and Day Is Done. This is not to mention a great many small galleries, the display strategies within which appear comparatively strained, if not outright baffling. In several places, thematically dissimilar works, sometimes separated in time by over a decade, appear side by side. Certain curatorial gestures feel obvious;  there is a nice pairing of Lumpenprole and Agitprop, which humorously literalizes the proverbial “shapes beneath the carpet,” with Horizontal Tracking Shots of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms, a faux-modernist sculpture that does a similarly bad job of hiding its demons: traumatic YouTube videos which erupt from its reverse side. Others seem downright arbitrary.

What results is an exhibition guided neither by chronology nor by overarching thematics, but by what the curators describe as an attempt to “underscore the recursive nature of Kelley’s work”—which is to say his return, again and again, to certain preoccupations throughout his tragically truncated career. Organized as it is in this purportedly bottom-up fashion, Mike Kelley in a way becomes the postmodern one-man show par excellence, more devoted to exhibiting the idiosyncrasies of the artist’s practice than to positioning Kelley in any historical or wider artistic context. (The organizers do make passing mention of Kelley’s supposed exploration of “post-punk politics”— a term they would do well to define.) In consequence, while many of the works in this show manage to startle and disturb, the insistent recursiveness regrettably benumbs more than it provokes. Perhaps it is still too soon.

Mike Kelley runs through February 2, 2014, at MoMA PS1.

Mike Kelley. Day Is Done, 2005; installation view, 2013. Courtesy of MoMA PS1. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

This is to say that the show is taxing, partly because Kelley’s art is itself often stress-inducing, concerned as it is with giving stage to images of trauma and giving form to anxieties that society would otherwise repress—and doing it with a fierce impudence and black humor that has been aptly classified as punk. To be sure, this disdain for the polished and the decorous is what makes Kelley so outstanding as an artist, and Mike Kelley deserves praise for including so many of his hard-to-stage projects. Take, for instance, his quixotically ambitious Day Is Done video installation series, which sets out to stage twisted “repressed memories” purportedly lurking beneath 365 high-school yearbook photos of extracurricular activities. Here we encounter twenty-five of the thirty-two completed installments together in one rich, cacophonous gallery.

Where the exhibition comes up regrettably short, however, is in opportunities to actually reflect on the career, tragically ended by Kelley’s suicide last year, that is so thoroughly on display. To what do Kelley’s lacerating meditations amount? For someone not already long acquainted with the artist’s practice, this retrospective, profuse as it is with examples, provides precious few opportunities to formulate a response.

The ground level contains Kelley’s canonized Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, a room-filling installation of soiled stuffed animals suspended from the ceiling in celestial agglomerations, surrounded by brightly colored, wall-mounted canisters that periodically release a deodorizing spray. The themes of sterility and decay at work pervade Kelley’s oeuvre, but the form here is uncharacteristically innocuous. Similarly unrepresentative, and occupying most of the first floor’s large remainder, are Kelley’s Kandor series, begun in 1999: large sculptures of Superman’s shrunken home planet, which, the story goes, the superhero keeps in a glass jar hooked up to atmosphere stabilizers. Conceptually evocative of environmental cataclysm or bodies on life support, while frequently phallic or otherwise genital, Kelley’s Kandors palpably materialize a tangle of anxieties, perhaps latent in the comics, that recur throughout the artist’s practice. The sculptures’ alluringly slick, candy-coated surfaces are a far cry from the aesthetic of scrappy appropriation and lo-fi video that largely characterized Kelley’s pre-Gagosian years.

Mike Kelley. Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, 1991/1999; installation view, 2013. Images courtesy of Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com.

Upstairs, one encounters a number of similarly vast and impressive projects. Notables include Pay for Your Pleasure, a corridor lined with portraits of famous intellectuals, each paired with a quote relating art and criminality, that begins with a donation box for the victims of violent crime and culminates with an artwork by an imprisoned local murderer; Black Out, a sprawling collection of works reflecting on the artist’s hometown of Detroit, completed in honor of the city’s 300th anniversary; and Day Is Done. This is not to mention a great many small galleries, the display strategies within which appear comparatively strained, if not outright baffling. In several places, thematically dissimilar works, sometimes separated in time by over a decade, appear side by side. Certain curatorial gestures feel obvious;  there is a nice pairing of Lumpenprole and Agitprop, which humorously literalizes the proverbial “shapes beneath the carpet,” with Horizontal Tracking Shots of a Cross Section of Trauma Rooms, a faux-modernist sculpture that does a similarly bad job of hiding its demons: traumatic YouTube videos which erupt from its reverse side. Others seem downright arbitrary.

What results is an exhibition guided neither by chronology nor by overarching thematics, but by what the curators describe as an attempt to “underscore the recursive nature of Kelley’s work”—which is to say his return, again and again, to certain preoccupations throughout his tragically truncated career. Organized as it is in this purportedly bottom-up fashion, Mike Kelley in a way becomes the postmodern one-man show par excellence, more devoted to exhibiting the idiosyncrasies of the artist’s practice than to positioning Kelley in any historical or wider artistic context. (The organizers do make passing mention of Kelley’s supposed exploration of “post-punk politics”— a term they would do well to define.) In consequence, while many of the works in this show manage to startle and disturb, the insistent recursiveness regrettably benumbs more than it provokes. Perhaps it is still too soon.

Mike Kelley runs through February 2, 2014, at MoMA PS1.