DECODER That Thing-centric Love
I hope you’ve had this problem: You like some art somewhere but you hate the social machinery around it. You know something is good, but the discourse, the nepotism, the snobs, the takes, the...
View ArticleA Bold Statement Decoder
I have a friend who, for the most part, paints abstract paintings. We were talking on the couch the other week about this period where she had started making not-abstract paintings. She had painted...
View ArticleThe Lobby, In Context Decoder
From the outside, the hotel lobby appeared to have (or be?) a gift shop—and an audaciously hip one. It said “porn” in awfully big letters, especially for a hotel lobby. I investigated. It didn’t have a...
View Article13 Ways of Looking at Kayla Decoder
It can be a disservice to describe an artist whose art describes a constantly changing self. 1. Kayla Tange looking platonically calm, platonically Asian, platonically a performance artist, dressed in...
View ArticleDECODER: Back at the Museums Pictures of Sailing Ships or the People that...
Months back, when the pandemic was still running strong, I wrote about how much I wanted to go to a museum—even a mediocre one. Well, now I can and I did and I remembered that most things are bad. We...
View ArticleThe Art of Cruelty — 10 Years Later Decoder
A lot has changed since 2011, when Maggie Nelson first published The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, her critically acclaimed collection of essays addressing violence and transgression in avant-garde art....
View ArticleResponsible and Irresponsible Art Decoder
The art-bureaucrat class is currently in a state of great anxiety over the differences between responsible and irresponsible art. The artists aren’t, but these categories aren’t up to them. Whether she...
View ArticleThe Truth Is Out There, Somewhere Decoder
Who doesn’t like a bit of mystery? But where are they keeping it these days? There are certainly unknowns—when will this pandemic really end? Did they really do that? But mystery is not the same as a...
View ArticleThings Art Should Be Doing Decoder
Maggie West took over a large, dark space somewhere north of Frogtown last week and filled it with massive images of flowers, pulsating time-lapse photographed in UV light. The colors have weird...
View ArticlePrayer Against Turbulence Decoder
You know when an airplane goes from just rattling back and forth to when it feels like the engines stopped and you drop, like, 20, 50, who knows how many feet and then picks up rattling again? I hate...
View ArticleDecoder: What The People Want Interview with an anonymous member of the public
Kacie is The Public. More specifically, she said it would be fair to describe her as “A woman who doesn’t closely follow the contemporary art scene but might go to a show this summer”. ARTILLERY: Are...
View ArticleDecoder Owning Art
Since the theme for this issue is “Private Property,” I assume someone besides me will be tackling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their sudden rise to collectibility—I’ll leave that to someone who can...
View ArticleEccentricity Isn’t Diversity Decoder
So I was making the usual—you know: one part cherry juice, one part club soda, two parts peach juice—and thinking about how artists are eccentric. Balzac supposedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day, Grant...
View ArticleDecoder Just Give Me the Minimum
I don’t want to paint anymore. I want to go to a big gallery or a museum. It doesn’t even need a roof anymore—I would go to a courtyard at this point. Not a nice one, necessarily; it can have one end...
View ArticleJoanna Beray Ingco Swallowed and Surrounded
We’ll be hearing for years and maybe decades about how the pandemic affected the lives of all the artists we’re used to hearing about but the crisis is going to have far deeper and more far-ranging...
View ArticleThe Role of Bad Art in a Democratic Society Decoder
An inevitable consequence of democracy, of equality, of freedom; of systems and technologies that more evenly distribute the power to influence the world; is the production and distribution of a...
View ArticleJoanna Beray Ingco Swallowed and Surrounded
We’ll be hearing for years and maybe decades about how the pandemic affected the lives of all the artists we’re used to hearing about but the crisis is going to have far deeper and more far-ranging...
View ArticleThe Role of Bad Art in a Democratic Society Decoder
An inevitable consequence of democracy, of equality, of freedom; of systems and technologies that more evenly distribute the power to influence the world; is the production and distribution of a...
View ArticleDECODER
You could draw people in masks. Paint them. Paint on them. Make videos where the face above changes but the mask does not, challenging the...
View ArticleThe Obsessive Voice of Reason
Many artists, we’ve been told, are obsessed. The way they repeat a subject, or a theme, their attention to detail or to finish, or just...
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