In Michael Joaquín Grey’s show the trouble begins with the first seductive photograph. After its abstract first impression fades away, a tiny, cryptically muted image is detectable—an upside-down rubber replica of the Tin Man’s helmet. One thinks of The Wizard of Oz—rusty, cheerful, and void of a heart. But no; perhaps the photograph is to serve as a metaphoric “funnel”—a starter button to a body of work that wishes to address seemingly everything: animation, logic, genetics, electricity, human development, animals, play, sexuality, evolution, erosion, and ecology. With the aid of the funnel in

One thing you can say for Buzz Spector is that he does his homework. The bummer is he hangs it in galleries and calls it art. The problem is not that Spector’s work is overly smart, or that he approaches knowledge as power (knowledge as value, privilege, security, boredom); what’s irritating is the way he treats that power—like a teacher’s pet, he deftly blends reverence and opportunism. Evoking the solemn certitude of a bible-study meeting, his latest show dutifully recites chart-topping art-world catechisms—we’re invited to sing along to our favorite hymns about the loss of the original, the

In this spare exhibition, Alison Wilding has constructed three disparate sculptural experiences—three tightly ordered arrangements of forms that play out pseudo-narratives, stories promised but seductively withheld.

In Temper, 1991–92, for example, a three-part configuration of shapes situated discreetly in the center of the room scarcely interacts with the space. Two seductively symmetrical, curved sheets of steel come together to form an eye-shaped wedge, with one of the two open ends resting on the floor. While this portion of the piece recalls Richard Serra’s walls of steel looming aggressively

For aficionados of the genre, the “Misfit Lit” experience was like being afflicted with a serious sweet tooth at a pie-eating contest. Confronted with so much interesting work crammed into so few rooms, one had to quell a little stab of panic at the overwhelming plenty and stifle the urge to stuff oneself sick. Isn’t it time to establish a few museums devoted to this flourishing medium, which has outgrown the modest accommodations “alternative” art spaces can provide? Or would that be ushering an art/literary form characterized by flexibility, spiritedness, and iconoclasm into the restrictive,