The title of Ezra Johnson’s solo exhibition at Freight + Volume, It’s Under the Thingy, is reminiscent of Amy Sillman’s flamboyant one lump or two at the ICA Boston and Bard’s Hessel Museum.
Freight and Volume
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Communal Spirits: Artists, Advocates and Unlocked Rooms
Stacked against the market-driven myth of the solitary genius, the role of community in fostering creative ferment is generally given short shrift. The neatly coordinated categories we encounter in museums, arranged by time period, style or place of origin, barely touch on the diverse constituencies and influences that brought the art into being.
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Quickening the Pulse in Miami
MIAMI BEACH — Parsing contemporary art’s inscrutable pecking order of markets and sensibilities is already a miserable endeavor, but the stakes inch ever higher in Miami, where the tantalizing gruel of celebrity gets spread preciously thin.
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Making Fun of Minimalism in Two Chelsea Galleries, Pt. 2
From the frothing press release for Haymaker, expectations may be running a little high for these five young artists to mount a full scale assault on the Chelsea firmament. Set up as a reaction to the Pop-driven, ever-quickening pace of the art market and the commodifying of art and the artist, Haymaker’s participants all take the market’s demand for fresh, bright, shiny objects head on, creating works that are eminently consumable. But running under the veneer of consumability is a cynicism and sarcasm that pokes fun at art market systems while still participating in them. This is no revolution, it’s a subversion.