Welcome to One Fine Showwhen the Observer highlights an exhibit that just opened at a museum outside of New York City, a place we know and love is already getting a lot of attention.
Unexpected developments in the attention economy are a ripple effect of advertising when it comes to the development of genres and languages. The medium that has developed the most in recent years is video games, which have leapt forward not only in terms of beautiful and expensive graphics but also in terms of liberating power that is unpopular with critics and promoters. On the other hand, the most talked about platform lately has to be television, which seems not only to have frozen but to have regressed to its former glory.The Sopranos period. Any irony or conflict has been postponed until nothing happens in any episode of the current series.
Painting, too, has thrived under its own irreverence over the past few decades, and this fact is celebrated and explored in “The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MCA) that collects the work of a variety of artists spanning more than a decade. six from around the world who “redefined painting using emerging technologies, imaging techniques and their own bodies. “
Indeed, this radical exhibition is not just about oil on canvas. You don't have to enjoy video games to see what Cory Arcangel's inclusion means Super Mario Clouds (2002), a pirated cartridge that removes all the characters and violence from the original Nintendo game to focus on the legitimate art of those chunky cumuli. There's a bunch of Thomas Bayrle from the '60s and '70s here, too, showing that people appreciated pixels before Generation X. In his computer-generated works, each image-generating unit is a work of art.
BREAKFUT: Exhibition of George Loudon's Collection in Venice Evokes a 17th-century Wunderkammer
What would a show like this be without Gerhard Richter, Wade Guyton and Chuck Close? But the chosen works are unusual. This is Richter's place New York (1989) is oil on the image and looks like a hand made version of the Photoshop clone tool. John Baldessari is another layup option, but instead of the obvious one Quality Important (1966-1968), instead we have a film Six Colorful Interior Activities (1977), where the hired painter shot above wearing a red coat, the next day it was orange, then yellow, green, blue and purple. Inspired by the painter's history of painting the apartments of his landlord father, this one strikes a chord with an era when house prices are skyrocketing—and sometimes paintings, too.
But let's get modern. Sarah Sze's installation was inspired, because what does she do when she's not painting household items? Several very complete canvases are included at Cynthia Daignault In the Picture Lake (Like you just feel it when you look at the river and the sky) (2017). The press release for the series began with a quote about Don DeLillo's Most Photographed Barn in America from White Noiseand this is the vibe with these. Photo by Jamian Juliano-Villani Historical Editing (2022) stands as something of an exhibition thesis: a portrait-cum-1980s colonial-era magazine ad featuring Drake. No one does mystery like him, from concept to execution. The most powerful new work of all may be Gina Beavers' De noche (2015), which follows the painting of the smoky eye in comic book panels, from the composite to the finished product. This exhibition seems to explain that painting is not only a successful medium but also a great illusion of our culture.
“The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020” is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago until March 16, 2025.
