In my journey as a sommelier, I’ve worked in fine dining in New York City for over a decade. I began dating an artist last year and now regularly attend gallery openings and even museum galas.  Exploring this new scene reminds me of the rarified culinary world in many ways. One thing that drives me crazy is that you can have multi-million-dollar art on the wall and billionaire guests, but the wine they serve at events is the equivalent to grape-flavored toilet water—a very poor pairing indeed.  It hurts my taste buds and does not enhance my appreciation of the art. Why doesn’t the art world care about something so important and beautiful as wine?

We are sorry to hear about your corked experience with art wine. Though the selection might come off as an afterthought at these events, the ubiquity of bunk cheap vino you have encountered has everything to do with the arid, inhospitable, and disease-prone terroir of the art world. Instead of elegantly balanced libations with floral notes, you have been served ashy “Two-Buck Chuck” decanted in an old Converse sneaker by a scowling bartender. Truthfully, nobody really drinks the wine unless you are a young guzzler prowling for a free buzz. Most are just sipping away the pain of being at an awkward art event by donning a pair of rosé-colored glasses. Next time, rather than fretting about spitting or swallowing museum shart-donnay, consider drinking the art Kool-Aid at these celebrations instead.

I’m a preservationist who took a job at a major archive last year. I was thrilled to work with my boss, who is prominent in the field, but it only took a month to realize that he’s a raging egomaniac. He talks to colleagues in our department as if he is an unimpeachable expert, even though we are all highly trained technicians doing the detailed work that he credits himself for at conferences and public talks. In those situations, he boasts so much about himself and his process that it actually diminishes the artists whose work we preserve. He needs to be reproached by his superior, and I plan to call him out to our director because his attitude and demeanor reflect poorly on our institution. How should I approach this?

Back in the day, it paid off to tell your teacher when the class bully was flicking boogers or calling you names having to do with pee-pee parts. Children are nature’s fiercest narcs, and it is only through social ostracization and playground beatdowns that they learn how not to be baby bitches or whiney snitches. The last thing you expected as an accomplished professional is to find yourself going through pre-K again. Instead of leaning into your crayon-colored playbook, you must handle this situation with all the college knowledge and wellness podcasts in your adult arsenal.

If your boss is as much of a prominent prick as you suggest, then there is no doubt that his boss already knows it. We’re guessing you might be in an old boys club where the shine that your megalomaniac boss brings to the institution nullifies the director’s need to reign him in. Institutions prop up braggarts and big personalities because they desperately need to attract attention, funding, and audiences, and it’s necessary to have a public face who promotes the good work that your institution is doing. The trouble comes when the mouth on that face needs to be punched in the lips.

Before taking any next steps, find out if other team members feel the same as you do about this reprehensible restorationist. If so, form a coalition—otherwise it could come off like you’re pursuing a personal vendetta. Gather evidence that corroborates your point. Document the stupid things this creep says. If you are making specific accusations, support them with hardcore proof. How glorious would it be if you happened to capture your boss talking smack about the director to visiting archivists from Argentina? If the higher-ups try to shoo away your complaint, then your next best option might be quitting. Losing a high-profile position in a field that’s hard to crack sucks, but preserving your inner peace is more important than a bunch of old stuff rotting in a vault.

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

But in a major decision last week involving Andy Warhol, the Supreme Court pushed this pillar of copyright law to the background. Instead, the Court shifted the consideration away from the artistic contribution of the new work, and focused instead on commercial concerns. By doing so, the Court’s Warhol decision will significantly limit the amount of borrowing from and building on previous works that artists can engage in.

The case involved 16 works Andy Warhol had created based on a copyrighted photograph taken in 1981 by celebrated rock and roll photographer Lynn Goldsmith of the musician Prince. While Goldsmith had disputed Warhol’s right to create these works, and by implication the rights of museums and collectors to display or sell them, the Supreme Court decided the case on a much narrower issue.

When Prince died in 2016, the Warhol Foundation (now standing in the artist’s shoes) had licensed one of Warhol’s silkscreens for the cover of a special Condé Nast magazine commemorating the musician. Explicitly expressing no opinion on the question of whether Warhol had been entitled to create the works in the first place, the Court ruled 7-2 that this specific licensing of the image was unlikely to be “fair use” under copyright law.

This is not necessarily a problematic result, given that Goldsmith also had a licensing market. Yet despite the Court’s attempt to limit itself to the narrow licensing issue instead of deciding whether Warhol’s creation of the original canvases was permissible, the reasoning of the decision has far broader and more troubling implications.

To know what’s at stake, it’s important to understand the fraught doctrine of “fair use,” which balances the rights of creators to control their works against the rights of the public and other creators to access and build on them.

What’s sometimes lost is in this discussion is that copyright law’s purpose (perhaps surprisingly) is to benefit the public—benefit to an individual artist is only incidental. The theory behind the law is that if we want a rich and vibrant culture, we must give artists copyright in their work to ensure they have economic incentives to create. But by the same logic, fair use recognizes that a vital culture also requires giving room to other artists to copy and transform copyrighted works, even if the original creator of those works objects. Otherwise, in the Supreme Court’s words, copyright law “would stifle the very creativity” it is meant to foster. Thus, to win a fair use claim, a new creator must show that her use of someone else’s copyrighted work advances the goals of copyright itself: to promote creativity.

Unfortunately, the Warhol decision took this already complex area of law and made it even more complicated. Lower courts and legal scholars will be fighting for years about its applications. But one thing is clear: it is now far riskier for an artist to borrow from previous work.

Not only did the Court downgrade the importance of whether a new work is transformative, whether it “adds something new and important” (to use the Supreme Court’s words from a previous case). The Court also painted a bizarre picture of Warhol as an inconsequential artist. Surely the Justices of the Supreme Court know that Warhol changed the course of art history. But the Warhol who emerges in the majority opinion is a tame portraitist whose work is just not that different from the photographs on which it is based.

In the Justices’ formulation, Warhol is a “style,” an artist whose “modest alterations” of the underlying photograph brought out a meaning that was already inherent in it, whose work portrayed Prince “somewhat differently” from Goldsmith’s image. Justice Elena Kagan, in a scathing dissent, charged that the majority had reduced Warhol to an Instagram filter.

Nowhere in the majority opinion would you recognize Warhol as a once-radical artist, the one de Kooning drunkenly approached at a cocktail party to utter, “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty.” Nowhere does one see the Warhol whom philosopher Arthur Danto called “the nearest thing to aphilosophical genius the history of art has produced.” That Warhol is the paradigm of an artist who brings new “meaning and message” to the work he copies, the very kind of artist that the now-diminished emphasis on transformative use was meant to protect.

Of course, this decision is not just about Warhol. For that matter, it’s not just about other Pop artists, or about appropriation artists.

Any artist who works with existing imagery should now reconsider her practice. Hire a lawyer, maybe try to negotiate a license and be ready to move on if you get turned away or can’t afford the fee. The safest and cheapest route—a consideration particularly relevant to younger artists and those who are not rich and famous—is to just steer clear of referencing existing work. Maybe that’s the right direction for art; maybe copying and relying on past work should be discouraged. But given the centrality of allusion, emulation, and copying to the history of art, it’s hard to imagine that’s a good thing. This is particularly so in contemporary digital culture, where, as I have argued, copying has taken on even greater urgency in creativity. But like it or not, these are not questions that artists, critics, and art audiences get to decide. The Supreme Court just changed the future of art.

Squinting at my screen, I zeroed in on the photos containing sedan-like vehicles, like the one next to the instruction “select all images with cars.” But other photos made me pause: one featured a bridge that cars might be traversing, while another contained a rank of buses. Abandoning nuance, I selected the sedans and passed: I am not a robot. It’s an excellent lesson in how artificial intelligence demands that humans curtail our tolerance for ambiguity in order to accommodate the objectives of the program.

Such encounters with computer vision formed the mundane background to my reading of Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning, Amanda Wasielewski’s timely endeavor to examine how the most rapidly advancing technology affecting society touches on the domains of art history, collecting, and the art market. The book opens by asserting the existence of a conflict between art historians and computer scientists grounded in mutual misunderstandings about each other’s fields, which Wasielewski aims to reconcile through an explanation of the strengths and weaknesses of artificial intelligence as an aid in the analysis of art.

At the center of the book are two chapters: the first provides an overview and critique of computer scientists’ use of digital reproductions of artworks in their research on how to improve the capacity for computer vision to identify and designate pictorial style; the second examines how museums and collectors are using machine learning to attribute and authenticate works of art. Wasielewski then closes by offering suggestions for how to bridge disciplinary divides between art historians and computer scientists. Given the increasing integration of artificial intelligence into many areas of academia, a study that investigates this terrain is sorely needed. But there are significant discrepancies between what the book does and how it frames its subject.

Wasielewski specifies that she is addressing neither the digital humanities more broadly nor artificial intelligence at large, but looking narrowly at machine learning and computer vision. Of course, machines don’t learn. The term “machine learning” was coined by IBM in 1959 for marketing purposes, and all it describes is a mathematical formula (an algorithm) applied to a collection of inputs (a dataset), which produces an output. That same formula, after training, should then produce the same outputs when applied to a different dataset.

The “supervised” version of machine learning involves training an algorithm on thousands of labeled digital images. For instance, an algorithm whose training set includes images of apples labeled “apple” can be expected to predict accurately which images contain an apple when applied to a different assortment of images. The problem is that if the training dataset contains only red apples, the algorithm will fail to identify an image of a green one.

In the “unsupervised” version, algorithms are applied to training sets without labels, and the program determines for itself which features define a target output. If the majority of the set’s images of apples include bowls, it may conclude that this is a defining characteristic of apples.

In both cases, supervised and unsupervised, we confront what scholar Brian Christian has termed “the alignment problem,” the divergence between human norms and values, and computational models’ abstraction of those norms to categories. Whatever happens between input and output happens in a black box and, at present, there is little humans can do to make its internal working scrutable.

Scrutable or not, the process creates three conditions that constrain the promise of computer vision for art historical research. First, any application of computer vision to works of art must be carried out on digital reproductions of them as opposed to the works themselves, a necessity for making any object in the world assimilable to a computer. The second stumbling block is the reliance of algorithms in supervised learning on tagging systems—meaning the metadata attached to a digital reproduction, with all the biases of the humans who created that metadata. Finally, the utility of an algorithm depends on the nature of the dataset on which it is trained, and since, as Wasielewski points out, canonical works of Western art grossly overpopulate the landscape of digitized art (for the same reasons of imperialism and inequity that made the Western canon canonical in the first place), then computer vision will continue to wrongly categorize or discount anything outside of that.

With these constraints in mind, the first chapter of Computational Formalism offers a valuable survey of research carried out by computer scientists since 2005 with aims to automate the process of sorting works of art into stylistic categories. Wasielewski issues a trenchant critique of those applications in their return to the unreformed formalism of academic art history’s past, an era when Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History (1915) took a commanding position in the field and categories like “Archaic” and “Hellenistic,” “Gothic” and “Romanesque” were construed as if they assumed an autonomous status apart from the human minds that conceived them.

Frankly, I am in awe of Wasielewski for her patient wading through what is, from the perspective of an art historian, an abundance of stunningly inane, and in some parts morally repugnant, writing that presumes “that the core aim in the study of art is to find groups of images that look similar” or that conflates style with beauty that can be quantitatively and objectively measured. The problem, as she shows, is that this research confuses human categories with truth inhering in form, makes no distinction between the digitized image and the object it digitizes, and fails to recognize partiality in the available datasets.

After handily dispatching the failures of this research, Wasielewski addresses another, more profound, issue plaguing it: ignorance that all categories are constructed, contingent, and relational. One example is the problematic label “Primitive,” which has been applied to works of diverse appearance and which makes meaning differently depending on context, whether as a pejorative for non-Western or pre-modern works, a condescending reference to a self-taught artist, or a celebration of one who subverted the conventional academic style in which they were trained. Clear to the art historian, but obscure to the computer scientists responsible for this research, is that assigning a category is an exercise of power.

From the domain of general style Wasielewski turns to individual style, and specifically, the high-stakes world of connoisseurship and attribution. While Wölfflin served as the avatar for the formalist revival examined in the preceding chapter, the 19th-century art historian Giovanni Morelli takes the stage as the mascot for the formalist renaissance pursued here. Giving new life to Morelli’s methods—attempting to “scientifically” identify the oeuvres of painters based on symptomatic features like earlobes—tech entrepreneurs use computational connoisseurship to atomize digital reproductions of authenticated works into patterns, which they promise their algorithms can detect in digital reproductions of unattributed works by the same artist.

Where Wasielewski is unequivocal in stating that “using image-based computational techniques to answer humanistic questions in art history is … a flawed endeavor,” she is less pessimistic when it comes to matters of attribution. The distinction, she argues, is between the fallacy that a general style resides in form and the certitude that an individual’s does. But given the historical peculiarity of this notion of authorship—whether applicable to select modern artists, or to a 19th-century fantasy of old masters’ individualistic practice—its remit is narrow.

Attuned to this shortcoming and its service to the Western canon, Wasielewski shrugs, citing computational connoisseurship as just one in a box of variously unreliable tools that collectors and museums will or will not use in their pursuit of wealth. After a brief section floating the potential value of machine learning to automate the identification of iconography, Wasielewski moves on to more interesting issues relating to the epistemology of authenticity itself, which, with the advent of generative artificial intelligence and its capacity to confect and even forge images, has emerged as a pressing concern among artists and society at large.

Wasielewski sets up her study as an effort to quell a battle between art historians and researchers in computation, arguing that we are witnessing a resurgence of the “science wars” of the 1990s, when scientists and humanists brawled over the concept of objectivity. But in order to position the current situation as such, Wasielewski must paint today’s antagonists as equally invested in and inhibited by ignorance about one another’s areas of expertise: on the one side are computer scientists who fail to understand basic art historical premises (like the conditional nature of stylistic categories); on the other side are art historians who produce faulty research by failing to understand the limitations of computation.

Yet the book’s only examples of humanists using machine learning in the interpretation of images are not the work of art historians: they are all studies undertaken by a single new media scholar, Lev Manovich. For Wasielewski, “computational formalism” describes “a revival of formalist methods in art history facilitated by digital computing,” and she frames the book’s central question as an examination of this shift’s implications for the discipline. If such a shift has happened in art history as the result of image processing by means of machine learning, Wasielewski provides no evidence for it.

In the final section of her book, Wasielewski suggests that humanists’ apprehensions about collaborating with computer scientists are about policing disciplinary purity. But whether or not that is the case, one needs to qualify that allegation with the recognition that this is also about disciplinary empathy. There’s a reason why we have seen the growth of “humanities labs” and not “sciences salons.”

None of this impugns Wasielewski’s incisive commentary on machine learning— the book musters the most skillfully limned assessments of its functionalities and limitations when applied to works of art to date. But I don’t share her optimism that a rapprochement can be achieved, since the “war” isn’t between humanists and scientists but rather between humanists and the administrators and legislators defunding and legislating us into extinction. If there is any hope of nurturing critical machine learning to induce a jolt to art history, then it will need to do more than disclose the violence of its brute reliance on inherited categories, which, using traditional forms of humanistic research, Wasielewski portrays so well.

Wasielewski concludes by endorsing metaphorical language as a channel for easing communication between scientists and humanists. But it seems to me that a metaphor is the very source of our alienation: namely, the description of computer vision as vision. If, in order to “see,” a computer demands that anything in the world be homogenized and processed as data, apart from all context and embodiment, then it is not vision; it is information management. And at present such information management can only induce us to see the world as information to be managed, plunging us further into a new era of categories, with all their errors.

The more gimmicky the space art, the more headlines it generates. Jeff Koons and Elon Musk—a match made in neoliberal hell—have teamed up for a new project launching (literally) this summer that allows collectors, perhaps bored of buying on Earth, to own art on the moon. Koons is sending 125 sculptures depicting different lunar phases to the moon on a SpaceX rocket, then pairing them with Earth-bound editions, each featuring a gem that plots the precise location of their lunar counterparts. Naturally, the editions all have corresponding NFTs.

If you could send anything to the moon, why would it be … a moon? Never mind that the lunar phases are irrelevant up there, since they exist only from an earthling’s perspective. If the collaboration is supposed to make gonzo ideas like colonizing Mars seem more humane, then Koons—whose shiny balloon dog sculptures are infamous for their abrasive vacuity—is an odd choice of artist. Instead, the collaboration has the opposite effect: it underscores the idea of the private space sector as a plaything for the ultra-rich.

You might think that the sky’s the limit with space art, but in fact, there are many constraints. Even Koons—one of the richest living artists, collaborating with one of Earth’s richest humans—complained about cost. His solution is the most obvious one: make the sculptures tiny. But other artists are getting clever and resourceful, finding ways to work around the material and corporate limitations.

LAST YEAR, WHEN CHINESE CONCEPTUAL ARTIST XU BING had to postpone his rocket launch, it wasn’t due to the technical delays that are all but expected with such a complex feat of engineering. Instead, it was because Chinese officials required the artist to prove, before sendoff, that the Chinese-looking characters painted on the rocket’s exterior were indeed, as Xu claimed, nonsense. If he were sending a secret message to the world—or to extraterrestrials—the government didn’t want to be the last to know.

This was challenging. How do you prove that something is nonsense? The prompt stumped the artist for a while, until he reframed the question—how do you appease a government bureaucrat? Eventually, he offered a certificate confirming the message was indeed gibberish, and that seemed to do the trick. Ready for takeoff.

When I visited Xu’s Brooklyn studio last fall, he told me he got the idea for Xu Bing Tianshu (2019–20) when a space company approached him to collaborate. He had already developed the characters for one of his previous works, Book from the Sky (ca. 1987–91), a set of scrolls containing 4,000 of them. When I asked him which company, he said he couldn’t tell me. It wasn’t hard to look up, though: it’s i-Space, a private Chinese company. I suspect he avoided naming them because the rocket didn’t make it through the atmosphere before it blew up. Xu and his team found the beat-up spacecraft the next day in the Gobi Desert, where it left a 90-foot-wide crater, then displayed it at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing. The resulting installation was a reflection on our species’ small role in a big world, one that inspires humility and awe in the face of a universe that we can barely comprehend. It’s a poignant piece, but a big hole and a broken rocket probably isn’t the publicity the company wanted.

Then there are size and material constraints: exorbitant costs, limits as to what can survive temperatures far below freezing, the whole zero-gravity thing. Rockets often drop off several satellites belonging to various parties in a kind of rideshare. The more weight and room they take up, the more expensive the lift. The New York–based artist-investigator Trevor Paglen came up with a clever solution for his 2018 project Orbital Reflector. He sent up a balloon in a satellite with a device that would inflate it when it went into orbit. Paglen chose lightweight, reflective Mylar that would reflect the sun, making the balloon visible from Earth at twilight and dawn. The artist wanted to highlight the best that the private space industry has to offer—exploration and innovation free from military or surveillance agendas—with a project that, like the best of space artworks, was meant to inspire wonder and awe. Sadly, during that year’s government shutdown, furloughed FCC workers weren’t able to grant the clearance necessary to inflate the balloon after it went up. The satellite was lost in space, along with the $1.5 million that it cost to produce.

Failure and humility are part and parcel of space exploration, though. That’s how Xin Liu, an artist and curator in MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative, put it when we spoke in February. Liu was amazed by all the resources offered at the Institute when she arrived as a graduate student in 2015—not every artist gets to share a water cooler with world-class scientists and engineers. Liu, who has a background in engineering and in performance, had long been interested in “experiments in measurements,” and was eager to scale up. But she confessed that it was only after her first zero-gravity flight that she began to ask an important question about sending art into space: why? Often, in STEM, the answer is, “to see if we can,” but that risks the consequences posed by nerds eager to see if they can split an atom who wind up inventing weapons of mass destruction.

In zero gravity, Liu found herself feeling sad and lonely. Something she had known her entire life—“the ground that had always held me”—was gone. She felt a similar sense of loss when she had her wisdom teeth removed: a part of her body was gone. And so, in 2019, she mourned by sending one tooth briefly into space. Soon, she began to wonder why many humans share such profound curiosity about the universe, and thought perhaps the impulse might be as natural as hunger or love.

Liu documented the launch of her wisdom tooth in a virtual reality video, Living Distance (2019), which will be on view this summer in her solo show at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. For another project, she launched potatoes into space for 30 days on a payload she designed herself; now, she’s planting them in the Pioneer Works garden. These are the basis of educational workshops that will culminate in feeding those potatoes to the children who sign up. When she told me this, I was flummoxed, and I followed up with that question she mentioned earlier: why? And she said, because she wanted to insist that space exploration shouldn’t just be a domain for eccentric billionaires. She hoped to bring it home for the next generation, so they might start to imagine their roles there.

DOES SOMETHING TAKE ON NEW MEANING when you send it into space? If it’s that easy, it would explain the odd symbolic gestures that litter recent history: humans have sent up dinosaur bones, a Nobel Prize replica, September 11 artifacts. In 2001 Pizza Hut even made a delivery to the International Space Station on a resupply rocket. But for Xu Bing a work doesn’t count as true “space art” when you just launch objects made for Earth into space. (For instance, Amoako Boafo’s 2021 project “Suborbital Triptych,” for which the Ghanaian artist sent up three paintings via Jeff Bezos’s private rocket company, Blue Origin.) But Tavares Strachan’s Enoch—which hitched a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 with Paglen’s balloon in 2018—is a good example of work that engages meaningfully with the conditions of outer space. Strachan’s work comprised a 24-karat gold urn containing a bust of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American astronaut, who tragically died in a 1967 supersonic jet crash, before ever making it to space. The work is a monument to what could have been, a way of helping Lawrence realize his dream posthumously.

This summer, Xu is planning to launch the world’s first satellite designed strictly for art’s sake. He knows it’s the first because there are about 6,000 satellites floating around right now, and each is categorized by its primary function. Xu hopes to collaborate with museums and invite artists for “residencies.” This is welcome news: the most thoughtful of the space artists is now leading the next wave. Xu’s satellite is less a tool for sending up objects than a conduit for using space as a medium. If all goes as planned, it will have screens to play videos, and cameras to take photos. The satellite should also be able to collect data from neighboring satellites, and transmit Morse code. Xu told me he wanted to start the residency because he hoped that encouraging free exploration from other artists might help expand his own imagination when it comes to this vast newly accessible territory.

It’s surprising that so much space art is so dull, given that outer space, like most good art, inherently asks all these existential questions about where we come from and what it means to be human. It’s why Bill Clinton had a lunar rock in his oval office—he’d point to it when debates got heated, and it would calm people down by making whatever problem seem smaller. If a rock can have that effect, you’d think it’d be almost too easy to make good space art.

The problem seems to be that, for a few powerful men, space elicits not humility, but a desire to conquer. Today, artists have a unique opportunity—and even responsibility—to shape our perception of, and role in, our extraterrestrial future. What could possibly go wrong?!  

I am writing as a member of the board of directors of a perennially busy and beleaguered art non-profit. We were recently faced with the excruciating task of terminating our long-standing director. They held their position for well over 30 years, but pressing legal matters and numerous documented acts of managerial negligence finally forced us to take action. We offered a severance package along with an emeritus position that provides continued health benefits. They agreed to our terms but clearly have not accepted their dismissal because they continue showing up to work, which is causing major discomfort and confusion for the staff, board, and everyone involved. Please advise us on how to handle this delicate situation so that we can all move on.

It’s always challenging when a long-serving employee can’t accept a change in their role. We once hired our former masseuse as an administrative assistant and soon found ourselves having to repeatedly ask them to stop kneading us all the time. Their firm touch and exquisite thumb-work was soothing within the sphere of their reiki studio, but in our office it felt more like harassment. This example is slightly different from your situation, but, in both cases, no always means no.

First and foremost, your entire board must have a candid conversation with your former director. A “thank you for your service” email won’t suffice. Bring pastries and explain in a kind yet direct manner that their time at the organization has ended. Gently remind them of their severance package and emeritus position, neither of which kicks in until they stop showing up. You must help them to discover that this transition opens up new opportunities that will keep them involved with the community in different ways. You should also change the locks.

Remember, the goal is to handle the situation with sensitivity and respect for the former director’s meaningful history with the organization. After so many years, they surely made some kind of worthwhile contribution, even if they are floundering in the present. If things progress and they refuse to play along, have your lawyer send a formal letter reiterating the termination of their employment and forbidding them to come within 500 feet of the office. And if none of these tactics work, establish a nice new emeritus office equipped with a rotary phone in a retirement community somewhere in the tri-state area.

I know it sounds ageist, but I’m a curatorial assistant who is being driven over the edge by my senior-citizen bosses’ inability to hit “reply all” to emails. I’ve demonstrated how to do it countless times, and at this point there is no excuse for their incompetence. Important communications with lenders keep falling through the cracks, and I’m constantly doing damage control. It’s outrageous! How can I get them to master this ultra-basic move?

Ah, the age-old (it’s a pun!) problem of getting the elderly to adopt new technology that isn’t even new anymore. Listen, whippersnapper: being ancient is a sad and completely valid excuse for just about everything that you screw up after the age of 40. If you were a good go-getter assistant, you’d be permanently logged into your boss’s account and reading all their emails daily in order to avoid such foul-ups. Your chances of getting the geezer to “reply all” are as good as our prospects of getting our kids to put away their goddamn Legos. The only real way to cajole children and old people alike into doing what you want is with bribes, so try rewarding your boss with a Werther’s Original every time they respond to an email correctly. Keep the supply of hard candies coming and they might even figure out how to add an attachment all on their own.

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

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Photography in Fragments

Two Books about Art History Examine a Discipline in Crisis

Dillon begins with semantic negotiations. “How to describe, as a writer, the relation it seemed the artists had with their chosen and not chosen—what is the word? Talismans? Tastes? Sympathies? Familiars? Superstitions? Affinities,” he writes. He describes affinity as “something like but unlike critical interest, which has its own excitements but remains too often at the level of knowledge, analysis, conclusions, at worst the total boredom of having opinions.” Dillon’s brand of affinity goes deeper than the internet’s algorithmic recommendations, and is more authentic than the manufactured kinships trumpeted in marketing collateral. Affinity, he writes, is like fascination, but not. It’s a less sentimental sibling to appreciation: a term with the same bloodline but a different character. It’s beyond aesthetics. It’s impermanent. Ultimately, it’s not even thinkable—a “mode of dumb fascination.” Elsewhere in the book, he describes the attempt to anatomize affinity as “stupid” and “idiotic.” His thematic playground here is the gap between how art transfixes us and our inability to articulate that transfixion. (T.J. Clark’s 2006 book on Poussin, The Sight of Death, shares such language; he wonders if only “the physical, literal, dumb” act of looking can satisfy the mind.)   

It’s risky to structure a book as a kind of Wunderkammer—what if it dissipates into its own eclecticism?—and riskier still to feature artists who have been embalmed by decades of analysis. But Dillon’s accretive method is itself a textual demonstration of affinity that helps his various subjects cohere. Artists who have their own chapter reappear in chapters about others: William Klein is invoked alongside Arbus and the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada; Claude Cahun is mentioned in connection to Dora Maar and Francesca Woodman. Chapters succeed each other in subtle embellishment, echoing or annotating earlier themes. In the first essay, for example, Dillon considers Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, the first book in English to present observations made with a microscope. “Among the better-known illustrations in the first edition of 1665 are those showing a fly’s many-faceted eye, the starry shapes of ice crystals and a prodigious bristling fold-out flea,” Dillon writes. This is followed by a chapter on Louis Daguerre’s Vue du boulevard du Temple (ca. 1838), a photograph of a Paris street that’s believed to be the first to depict living people: the smudged apparitions of a man and his boot polisher. Nothing links these two works except an analogy that Dillon leaves implicit: Just as a microscope reveals the invisible world around us, so can a photograph illuminate what we typically ignore.  

This understated approach is typical of Dillon. He writes atmospherically and impressionistically rather than critically. Here is how he describes a photo of dancer Loie Fuller: “She looks like a primitive aircraft coming apart, a soft disintegrated Blériot.” About the elderly subject of a 1970s Eggleston photo, whose particolored dress clashes with the floral cushion she sits on, he writes: “She holds onto her cigarette as if she might disappear amid all this patterned excess.” In Arbus’s ensemble of outcasts and misfits he discerns an “aristocratic distance”—an apt phrase whose accuracy doesn’t evoke any one image but the whole dispassionate vantage of Arbus’s work. 

As befits a book conceived during the pandemic, Affinities is introspective and fitfully elegiac, even as it seeks communion. In his chapter on Vue du boulevard du Temple, Dillion recalls walking around London during the spring of 2020. He notes “a category of city person who seemed suddenly more visible than before”—fellow housebound Londoners out for a stroll who, like Daguerre’s phantasmal figures from nearly two centuries earlier, are rendered newly vivid by their circumstances. A chapter about the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, a monument in London whose plaques record stories of ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others, begins as another pandemic scene before taking a more philosophical turn. “The things a nation may conceal from itself inside an idea of heroism,” Dillon muses, noting that many would-be plaques on the monument remain blank. Elisions, often conceptual, recur throughout the book, most pointedly in the final chapter, which lists “images that are not mentioned and do not appear in this book, but will not leave the mind.” (Among the missing: French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue’s depiction of his cat catching a ball; filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Polaroid of his wife and their dog standing by a fence in Russia.) 

These missing images parallel one of the book’s subtexts: artists’ oblique and unacknowledged relationship to modernism, which Dillon defines broadly as the aesthetic tendency toward ambiguity and formal experimentation. He suggests that the 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron might be considered a modernist, her blurred portraits and tableaux vivant representing “a deliberate effort to capture something evanescent but particular.” The French photographer and filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who made lyrical documentaries about aquatic life, is another modernist, one who attends “to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street.” (Note how gracefully Dillon posits additional affinities.) If part of Dillon’s project is to reclaim or excavate lineages of modernism, then another definition of affinity emerges. To be modern is to connect one thing to another. Affinity is connection; affinity is modern.   

But affinity is also, finally, a mood, as Dillon concedes. And the mood is intimate in two back-to-back chapters—the most moving in the book—that look outside the canon toward more workaday, even vernacular, imagery. In the first, Dillon considers a press photograph of a charismatic Christian congregation, shot in Dublin in the 1980s or ’90s. “Their faces compose a selection of mundane ecstasies, such as I know well from certain churches of my childhood,” he writes. His mother, plagued by depression and, later, a fatal autoimmune disorder, belonged to just such a congregation, a “rapt sorority of the unwell and the unhappy.” Dillon recognizes his mother’s ghost in the faces of these middle-aged pilgrims, one of whom offers her hands in a gesture that’s either beseeching or quizzical. In the following chapter, he writes about his aunt, whose paranoid grievances against her neighbors culminated in a series of reconnaissance snapshots taken around her property: of hedges, doors, windows. “You can pursue vigilance and attention into a kind of fugue state, almost hallucinatory,” Dillon writes. He’s referring to his aunt, but the line has a cautionary tone, self-conscious and chastened.  

That tone recurs a few pages later, when Dillon confesses a suspicion that “nothing I write pursues an argument or is built to convince. Instead, I simply get into a mood about the thing I am meant to be writing about, and pursue that mood until it is exhausted or has filled the space it was meant to fill.” He’s right, of course, but he’s in good company: Wayne Koestenbaum, Maggie Nelson, Walter Benjamin, and, most emphatically, Roland Barthes all share Dillon’s dilatory, memoiristic method. Like those writers, Dillon revitalizes images by respecting their inherent ambiguities and enigmas rather than seeking to resolve them. (One more quote: Dillon calls the work of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi “a domestic photography, dedicated to an infinity of small things, impossibly tender and exposed.”) Dillon is acutely sensitive to the subfrequency of his chosen images, and he regards them with curiosity and sympathetic scrutiny.  

In one of the book’s late chapters, he writes about the final TV interview that British dramatist Dennis Potter did, in 1994, shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Potter remarks that impending death has made the world almost hyperreal—more radiant, more fully itself. Dillon achieves a similar miracle in these pages, the “mundane miracle of looking,” as he calls it. The images he contemplates become sharper and stranger, aligned in myriad inscrutable ways to each other and to the world. It’s an irreducible process that’s finally beyond our understanding but impossible to resist—something, perhaps, like love.  

As an art historian and freelance contributor of reviews and long-form articles to art publications, I’ve been watching with trepidation as the already limited media landscape contracts. Many of my PhD colleagues are firmly ensconced within academia or pursuing curatorial work, while I have been following my own path as a writer and erstwhile kundalini yoga instructor. Breath is important in yogic practice, and I sense myself suffocating from the lack of publishing platforms. I want to stretch my thoughts, but I feel cramped by the dearth of public space for critically erudite voices. Faced with ever-diminishing opportunities for enlightened art writing, I’m left wondering: Is it time to push aside my pen and concentrate on a full-time Ayurvedic practice instead?

You know, we sort of wonder the same thing. Why struggle to write about art for a living when you can have tight abs and paying disciples who also give holiday presents? You’ll earn way more lying on the floor than you ever would sitting at a laptop conjuring a synonym for fetid (try noisome). And yet, the impulse—nay, the desire—to write isn’t something one simply shakes off. Sure, you can hold a difficult pose using all your upper trapezius, but your biggest muscle is still your noggin. It’s time to decide if you want to be a brainy Branden W. Joseph or a brawny Joseph Pilates.

Yoga repairs the body and unblocks chakras, whereas art criticism feeds the mind and puckers the anus. No one has ever achieved nirvana by assessing the aesthetic qualities of Liam Gillick’s speculative sculptures, but they have realigned their spine by doing a Cat-Cow. Your yoga lessons improve the physical and mental well-being of your students in ways that resonate throughout all facets of their daily lives. Can the same be said of your footnoted rebuttal of Graham Harman’s specific strain of post-Kantian object-oriented ontology vis-à-vis contemporary art? This is a rhetorical question to which the rhetorical answer is a firm no.

Having a viable career as a critic has never been easy, but given your natural limberness and loquacity, there is no reason to quit writing. Why not deliver your aesthetic insights straight to readers via Substack? You’ll have all the yoga-mat space you need to maintain your writer-warrior pose, and best of all, you won’t have to bend over backward for hair-splitting editors who rewrite your carefully crafted words. A few friends may actually feel guilty enough to pay for it. Wouldn’t that be wild?

Last week I bumped into a former art school professor who I completely worship, and we quickly caught up on things. I gushed to him about my progress in the studio and how I’ve pushed my paintings into a new creative zone. Right before parting he asked if I’d dog-sit his pooch while he’s in Italy for the opening of his museum show. It was totally flattering to be asked, but his dog is an ugly, flatulent menace. He takes the mutt everywhere, and everyone pretends it’s the cutest, most lovable thing in the world. Even though I’m not supposed to have pets in my apartment, it feels like I can’t decline because this is a good opportunity to connect. Am I right?

It sounds like you two aren’t in close touch and he hasn’t seen your paintings in a while. The honor he dumped on you has less to do with your artistry than with your potential as a walking MFA pooper scooper. Taking this dog-sitting gig would make you the mangy mongrel on a short leash. What happens if you do a good job? Will he give you a bone? Lick yourself, tell him you are a cat person, and go hide in a corner. 

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

I’m inspired by the messaging and guerilla tactics of the climate change activists who’ve been smearing food on paintings. I want to do this same thing and already know what museum and artwork I want to attack, but to be honest, I’m scared. How much trouble could I really get in?

Activists are truly turning up the heat on museums with their push to get the public to chill the Earth before mass extinction. What’s the point of hoarding masterpieces when there won’t be anybody left to see them? That’s how much trouble we are actually in. Stop worrying about your personal safety and start perpetrating climate-action art spectacles that make a definitive difference. Perhaps you will find yourself: throwing warm sauerkraut at a Jordan Wolfson robot, Gorilla-Gluing your taint to a painting by Dana Schutz, splotching a cream cronut on a Chuck Close, or pointedly urinating on an Andres Serrano photograph. Keep your manifesto on-hand to shout at befuddled bystanders, or better yet: write it on your chest because you are about to be the main attraction at the museum.

I attended an East Coast graduate school and lived in Brooklyn for almost a decade before moving to the Midwest to teach. Juggling work and a family means that I rarely have time or money to travel to see shows or old friends. My grad school alumni email list lets me keep tabs on my peers, but it also causes significant stress and insecurity, which is why I never post and rarely reply. The list occasionally falls prey to a handful of antagonistic people who love to stir the pot. I was especially bothered by a recent thread where an artist friend was attacked for having a show at a museum that has not been sufficiently decolonized. It was so accusatory and exasperating—exactly the sort of negative energy I don’t need to absorb. I want to unsubscribe from the list, but I fear that doing so will further cut me off from any sense of community and the art world in general. What would you do?

A recent pie chart published in MFA Life SkyMall Magazine shows that some 83 percent of art school alumni want to self-immolate when posting to email lists filled with heavy hitters, tired teachers, forgotten classmates, and total strangers. As for the rest, 10 percent love bragging about their accomplishments; 5 percent absolutely must ask inane research questions; and 2 percent are looking for a lift to Trader Joe’s next Tuesday. The good news here is that your feelings of resentment and shame solidly place you in the majority. The bad news is that, demographically speaking, jagoffs fall into every category and cannot be avoided, in the real world or in your inbox.

Alumni email lists provide space for colleagues to make announcements, celebrate accomplishments, and share relevant information. Most subscribers don’t post or reply because they have busy lives and careers. They stay on the list because, like you, they hope to learn about current exhibitions, get notices about grants, brownnose old connections, and track frenemies. Nevertheless, it is their silence that ultimately gives latent permission to blowhards, dimwits, and the attention-deprived to self-promote, brain-pick, finger-point, ass-kiss, and whine. Think about it: what would happen if you and the rest of the rankled lurkers on the list checked in to say STFU a little more often?

FOMO is justified given your level of remove, but letting a handful of domineering putzes keep you from getting a notice about a group show in Croatia that a rando has a collage in is plain ludicrous. Email lists typically have digests, so try changing your subscription to lessen the stream of messages. You can block the offenders who piss you off the most, but it’s just as easy to have listserv emails automatically go into a special folder that only gets checked when the urge strikes. And like everyone else, you can rush to delete the thousands of unread alumni messages when that warning pops up about needing to buy more storage space. Fuck Google.

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

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Bad Reviews contains facsimiles of more than 150 reviews selected by 150 artists, many very famous (Lawrence Weiner, Cindy Sherman, Marilyn Minter), who were solicited through a chain of invitations started by artist Aleksandra Mir. The prompt was to pick a “bad review” they had received, whatever “bad” might mean to them—poorly written, mean-spirited, misguided, wrong, negative, all of the above. There are examples of each from a full spectrum of outlets, from gallery roundups in the New York Times to a pan on the record-collecting website Discogs. The reviews compiled are often sophisticated responses to sometimes complex artwork—most offered in good faith. Writes Tim Griffin, the project’s coeditor and head of Artforum from 2003 to 2010: “A review can be bad in as many ways as the artworks it is critiquing.”

This is a review too—not a bad one, not a good one. Like many reviews, this is an attempt to figure out what I really think, how I really feel. To be clear, I’m not objective. I am a critic, and (although Roberta Smith claims the crown at 10 mentions) I appear in Bad Reviews twice—for one online Critic’s Pick of a show I didn’t like and one back-of-book review of a show I did. The table of contents is organized by year, then by artist. If I’d been in charge, I’d have included the critics—in a smaller font, maybe—but Bad Reviews is less about the critics than the artists and the barbs they’ve carried in their thickening hides for up to half a century.

The idea for Bad Reviews originated in 2015, though you have to wonder if the germ wasn’t planted in 2006 when Waldemar Januszczak in London’s Sunday Times lumped Mir into “a generation of paint-happy know-nothings brought up on hamburgers and porn, a talentless bloom of post-pop trailer trash.” The earliest entry, from 1963, is one notable artist’s first mention in the New York Times: “Carolee Schneemann’s assemblages are unforgivable,” penned John Cannady. (Schneemann acidly, accurately calls him the “then famous critic” in a note accompanying her submission.) Some artists deliver their bad reviews like mic drops—art history has done the work of repudiating their skeptics. Ed Ruscha contributes a 1963 rejection letter from the Library of Congress, which declined to accept a copy of his breakthrough artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

The best criticism can point out missteps or blind spots in an artist’s work—though, since these reviews are all volunteered by their subjects, there’s little of that here. The general feeling imparted is that the artists disagree with or are amused by their bad reviews, not that they’ve taken them to heart. If a review deploys the arch tone of old-guard critics and actually calls work “bad,” Bad Reviews holds it up for pillory—as when, in 2004, Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight wrote of the Danish artist group Superflex: “It’s just about as bad as art gets these days.”

The book’s design can be dismissive, bordering on disingenuous. The editors splash pull-quotes like “DON’T GO” and “INTOLERABLY VOYEURISTIC” across Arlene Croce’s lengthy, thoughtful, and damning review of Bill T. Jones in the New Yorker. The subject in question? A performance piece featuring terminally ill people, about which the writer wrestles with the pertinent moral question of how or whether to engage what she calls “victim art.”

Bad Reviews can’t be bought. Framed as an art project, its 400 copies were distributed only to institutions and participating artists. Mir says that this is to skirt copyright issues. I suspect it’s also a way to sidestep expectations that the book make some sort of call—a judgment—about the state of bad reviews. On this point, the editors’ written contributions are ambivalent. Mir thanks the lovers and the haters with equal verve. Griffin is even more equivocal, praising the bad review as a fading style of discourse, a direct “response” rather than a passive forward or retweet, but stopping short of pining for the age when some people were paid a living wage for their bald opinions.

If the editors use the phrase “bad review” with a wink, not all the participants take the book’s premise lightly. As Mir writes, some artists (and their galleries, she speculates, fearing for their prices) declined to participate, perhaps because they would rather pretend their bad reviews never happened. Certainly, a few reviews I’ve written in the past haven’t made it on to the subject’s CV. Which is a shame. Even a negative or unflattering writeup usually comes from a general devotion to art and artists that compels writers of reviews.

Defining “quality” in terms of good or bad might be a useful way to evaluate clothing or wine or other commodities, but it is vanishingly useless for art. An artwork of “poor quality” can still be “good,” conceptually or emotionally or beautifully—just as a “bad” review can still be right. When it comes to art, certainty is rhetorical. Unresolved ambivalence is what I and many others find exciting about art. Likewise, this book achieves ambivalence around the idea of “bad reviews,” which makes it good art.