“All of This and Nothing. I mean, I think it just works so well for this show, right?” He’s smiling because he’s just finished telling us that the title of the Psychedelic Furs song from their eponymous 1981 album Talk Talk Talk came to him a month ago, like a bolt from the blue, while driving to a curatorial meeting in which the title of the Hammer Museum’s conceptually ambitious exhibition, All of This and Nothing was then, as yet to be determined. And, as he tells it, being a staunch fan of The Furs, not to mention somewhat of a conceptually, and pop-culturally savvy dude, he saw a perfect opportunity to contextualize the work of roughly a dozen disparate contemporary artists under this single unifying umbrella: this – according to him – fitting, poetically concise moniker. The “he” in question was Douglas Fogle, acting as museum tour guide to a group of art students, myself included, who had come to the Hammer seeking enlightenment. I gather he is a rather important figure, all the signs are there: simple yet elegant shoes, designer jeans, immaculately sculpted coif, and the fact that he can really, you know, “talk” about Art. You know the way I mean, the way we all secretly wish, in our darkest of hearts, that we could talk about Art, even though, if we’re honest, we usually find it to be rather pretentious, even a wee bit condescending when we’re forced to endure listening to it. But even were it not for these tell-tale signs, I was also fully aware that our guide was not your average docent, in fact it turned out he’s the chief curator for the Hammer Museum, a position he only recently (2 years? recent enough in...

Some art works operate like a bluff.  They challenge you to take them up on their offer – to call what they are as art and agree with their assigned cultural value.  While there is the concept and theory that blankets the object in its meaning, at the core of an object is the viewer’s receptivity. For artist Jennifer Mills, every action by the viewer must be countered by an act on her part to maintain her role as saboteur.  As her art practice encompasses all aspects of the art machinery (concept, production, exhibition, viewer) the work is not finished until we have measured and documented the audience and their actions. As part of her practice, all Mills’ objects are priced at $10 or below to counter the art industry’s valuation of works.  Specifically for the series Art Object, the artist offered the entire set of objects for a more significant sum.  Los Angeles Gallerist Steve Turner negotiated an undisclosed sum below the offered price and purchased the set.  Herein lies the criticality behind the series of these moves:  the viewer offers up a negotiated price challenging the artist’s stated worth, the artist agrees or disagrees and a sale is either gotten or forgotten.  Quite often this is the end of the artist/patron cycle in the 21st century.  But with Mills, the cycle expands to reflect on the business of art. Ms. Mills continues her series of detournements in this instance by generously offering the Gallerist a “gift with purchase.” She has co-opted a well-known promotional gesture within commerce – the offer of additional items for free.  In this case, the offer consisted of mice to go along with the mousetraps which were the art objects purchased.  For the artist, the circle of meaning...

April 30 – May 20, 2011, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sullivan Galleries Marcel Broodthaers had his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968): a museum of his making to counter the art system of the 20th century. It was groundbreaking but quite frankly, analog in comparison to our current state of art and commerce. The system of making an artist and art object from the MFA program to art star, in five steps or less, has gone beyond the level of institutional critique that begins at the museum. Our present art institution runs at hyper-speed, in multiple formats with a viral reach – how to counter the system that has become corporatized and co-opted beyond measure? For Broodthaers, there was still a means of engagement that could be offered up as something counter to the object of his criticism. Today, we are all participants in the system; even those who claim to work from outside the system are actually part of it. All spaces and stands of rebellion have been accounted for. How then to critique? Enter Jennifer Mills, “graduate art student” at SAIC. Through a conflation of her role as both artist and student, Mills performs an elegant double entendre. Part of an ongoing series of investigations on art, commerce and the artist/patron relationship, Mills performs the student in the SAIC program with the result that her MFA thesis exhibition comments on the art system machinery while also producing art objects for consumption. Mills’ position in the art machinery is one that wholly embraces her trajectory – she is aware of how every facet of the system in which she is a part of works to validate her as an artist. Mills does not act to counter this system; rather,...

I used to think about becoming a religioso, but I don’t have churchly predilections, or the other kind. The life of the ascetic appealed to me. Failing that, I wanted to be a hermit, but my tastes run to blissfuly functionless shoes and Zegna dress shirts. The problem is that I have never wanted the opposite, to be a member of society or its adjuncts. I notice that my dogs are exactly the same. They have no desire to participate in most activities, but God forbid those activities take place outside of their witness. There is a place for people like me, the table for one. I don’t get invited to parties. Nothing about my affect suggests that I am a party person, which is not to say I am a wall flower. I enjoy parties, but it is clear to most people that I am enjoying them on a completely different level than small talk come-ons and the freedoms of music and libation. I need people to animate my world, but “people” in most contexts could not be more tedious, I imagine that being deeply connected to them is like being at the end of a very long rope on which you will eventually hang. I have often wondered what I have in common with sociopaths. Latin suggests to me that both their problem and the solution lies in people. I imagine that my neighbors would describe me in the same terms, “He was so quiet, very polite. We knew him well enough to wave, but I can’t remember ever speaking more than a few words with him.” I need these people, which is to say, I would not live where I do without them. Indeed, I would not be as happy if...

For weeks, now, online news outlets have been running live streaming video of the Gulf Coast oil leak, courtesy of British Petroleum. And I don’t mean, by this, that the oil leak itself is courtesy of BP—which, of course, it in large part was and is (but also of the whole bloody system that produces and sustains something like BP in the first place)—but that the live streaming video has been provided by BP itself, as a part of the company’s damage-control performance of a commitment to keeping the public abreast of the situation. The idea seems to be to counteract the negative publicity that has resulted from the oil spill itself and the unprecedented environmental and economic damage that has attended to it with a show of unprecedented corporate transparency. But if the live streaming video of the underwater leak is its sign and symbol, BP’s turns out to be an odd sort of transparency, indeed no matter what time of the day or night one tunes in to the underwater video feed, what one sees is always the same: a hopelessly muddy image, as though photographed through a mud-covered lens, of a kind of muddy muddiness gushing into muddily muddy water. If there were any doubt about the muddy opacity of all of this transparency, it was erased once and for all when, just the other day now, we were treated to muddy underwater footage of actual mud being pumped into the underwater oil well in yet another effort to somehow staunch the spewing. It’s difficult not to wonder if, in predictably cynical fashion, BP located precisely that point of view from which seeing absolutely everything meant seeing absolutely nothing at all—just mud in mud through mud—and promptly installed their show-the-public-everything cameras...

Dispense with the posing and what are you left with? I would like to be able to answer this question for you, but the pose is the defining feature of our time. Were you to dispense with it, no one could predict the catastrophe. Like everything else that we are paranoid about failing to recognize about the twenty-first century, street art is not new. It is not a new route to cultural significance. It is not an unlikely voice for counter messages. It is not an entity without a history, or precedence, or a canon. The soundtrack is The Velvet Underground fed into a loop. There is a knock-knock joke about a writer of fortune cookies; I can’t remember the punchline. I once tried to explain visual literacy to my mother. It didn’t go well. I kept coming back to the issue of profanity. “Skull fucking” nets 2,980,000 hits on bing. The revolution will be sponsored. Is feedback really that interesting? I like going to the movies alone. I go to the $2 theatre. They don’t really mind if you drink. The venue could have easily housed a porno theatre, but video killed that off. The theatre is properly debased. The seats are broken. The screen is stained with sticky splotches; soda is semen. It is the best venue to watch a blockbuster I have ever found. The star is the green stripe down the screen. Every generation believes that the world will end on its watch; is it ego? What does it mean to be famous and a recluse? The thought police have declared war on the oxymoron. I can’t remember the last time I saw art in an art gallery. I was promised ‘reciprocal ferocity;’ instead, I get Laura Owens (3,240,000 results)....