Prayer 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 ArticleDECODER 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...
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