LAST TUESDAY NIGHT, the LA art world converged on Western Avenue—just south of Melrose among a strip of futon stores, smoke shops, and gas stations—to witness the unveiling of David Zwirner’s new outpost. The block was mobbed as I arrived with the artist Larry Johnson. “Oh my god,” he whimpered with incredulity. “This is where it is? I spent my whole life on Western Avenue . . .”

Located at the conflux of Hollywood (a few blocks from the Paramount Lot) and Koreatown, this stretch of Western was once a hotbed for seedy gay bars (Larry favored the Black Lite) and still is for sex work (it’s not

I CONVINCED MYSELF that writing this was an opportunity to channel my inner Rhonda Lieberman—if only that were possible. Last week in Chicago, as I made my way through the early moments of the Renaissance Society’s 2023 “RenBen: TRU RENAISSANCE”—an annual fundraising affair masterminded by the storied institution’s chief curator and director, Myriam Ben Salah, and creative-directed this year by artist and choreographer Adam Linder—I sought out a scandal, but found none; I yearned for juicy gossip, but couldn’t manage to dig it up. I tried to provoke artist Piero Golia, who was in attendance as

LAST THURSDAY AFTERNOON, I waded through the throngs of tourists around the Vessel to meet my friend Anya Komar at the Shed for Frieze. Komar, formerly a long-time director and gallery partner of Miguel Abreu (she now runs Ulrik, in Chelsea), remembered how the fair at Randall’s Island always seemed on the brink of collapse—leaky ceilings, sweat, and broken ACs that transformed showrooms into saunas. No such discharge or human frailty at Hudson Yards; although the name of Frieze’s newish location suggests a messy outbuilding to store unused toys or dusty childhood trophies (OK, maybe not such

On a recent Friday night, Performance Space New York transformed from a theater to a club: a DJ played disco and R&B, drinks were flowing, and people chatted under neon lights as a feeling of electricity and potential lingered in the air. This was the setting for NOTHING #122: a bar, the first performance in Autumn Knight’s residency at the East Village arts space. Knight and a cameraperson captured interactions between herself and audience members, inviting them to talk about themselves, feed each other food and drink, and act out various scenes––such as tying one another to a chair or mimicking

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors. By Ian Penman. New York: Semiotext(e), 2023. 200 pages.

PICTURE THIS: Camera slowly panning across shelves littered with dog-eared paperbacks, soiled scripts, handwritten corrections, framed stills, loose pills. A copy of Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (a book of personal notes on—to?—the late director) unobtrusively propped up amongst a slightly phantasmagorical recreation of the filmmaker’s last living quarters. Two or three televisions going in every empty room. News headlines and obituaries (“RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER, 37, FILM MAKER, DEAD”) flash

IN A STRIKING BREAK from its typical Manhattan-centric provincialism (even more pronounced, in those days, than it is now), the New York Times gave over an entire two-and-a-half columns in the Style section of the March 10, 1977, edition to some very local news out of Philadelphia. Written, of all people, by Anna Quindlen—still twenty-five years before her Pulitzer—the story details the presumed final luncheon of the New Century Club, once a fixture of high society in the City of Brotherly Love and a force for women’s rights nationwide. The occasion coincided, ironically, with the hundredth

Affinities: On Art and Fascination. By Brian Dillon. New York Review of Books, 2023. 320 pages.

IN THE EARLY WEEKS of the pandemic, I became obsessed with maps of New York City. Cloistered in my apartment in upper Manhattan, I would stare at the subway map for hours, studying every stop on every line. I would wander around Brooklyn on Google Maps, memorizing the order of avenues and streets. I played quizzes where you would look at photographs taken on the street and have to guess the neighborhood. It must have seemed like a sad way to pass the time, but the obsessive scrutiny seemed important.

An Oblique Autobiography, by Yve-Alain Bois; ed. Jordan Kantor. San Francisco and New York: no place press, 2022. 376 pages.

THE PUBLICATION of Yve-Alain Bois’s latest book marks a watershed in the oeuvre of this influential scholar. What is the place of this most personal (and most surprising) of Bois’s publications in the arc of a career that extends from his cofounding of the groundbreaking journal Macula in the mid-1970s to teaching positions at Johns Hopkins and Harvard to his tenure as professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, a position he held from 2005 to 2022? What insights

HOW SWISS IS IT? Cyril Schäublin, who joins the Zürcher brothers as one of the leading auteurs of the first major wave of Helvetian filmmaking since the heyday of Alain Tanner and Daniel Schmid half a century ago, appears determined in his first two features to demolish the myth of Swiss probity, especially in the echt Schweizer realms of finance and industry. Schäublin made his brilliant debut with the ironically titled Those Who Are Fine (2017), about a young worker at a Zurich call center hawking internet services to vulnerable seniors—the provider’s portentous name is Everywhere

IN MARCH, New York’s David Zwirner opened its first solo exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s work since the painter’s defection to the megagallery from Marian Goodman, his gallerist of thirty-seven years. The show featured fourteen of his last paintings, completed in 2016 and 2017, made before the artist, now ninety-one, declared his retirement from painting. It also contained seventy-six drawings—the products of the practice that replaced the physically arduous process of painting for Richter—and a single glass-and-steel sculpture. If one were looking for a kind of retrospective, or a coda and

LAST FRIDAY AFTERNOON at David Zwirner, Benjamin Buchloh was heralding Gerhard Richter as the painter-inheritor of twentieth-century History. Then he added: “Will his paintings have lasting reverberations like the urinal? Probably not.” An ambivalent aperitif of a speech to kick off the evening. Later that night, around the corner at Petzel, Seth Price unveiled his large-scale paintings impeccably mixing 3-D graphics, abstraction, and AI-generated representation, in his first New York solo show in five years, only the second time in nearly a decade he’s exhibited new work. They looked small in

Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson. By Suzaan Boettger. University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 440 pages.

ASTONISHINGLY, it has taken fifty years since his death for a “life” of Robert Smithson to emerge. Then again, the endlessly polysemous nature of Smithson’s art, the vertiginous heap of writing on him already out there, and his own profound ambivalence toward the very enterprise of history—collective and personal—make him a rather daunting subject. The prospective Smithson biographer, over the winding course of her inquiry, must advance despite so many taunting aphorisms like