Ever the showman, Sean Landers served up a ribald homage in his recent West Coast show to—of all people—William Hogarth. What, one asks, is Landers, the self-proclaimed cultural neophyte who gave dilettantism a good name, doing evoking an artist who is anything but the flavor-of-the-month?

Whatever the reason, Landers is definitely not turning to the past to satisfy a morbid desire for art-historical excavation. On the contrary, Landers’ gutsy, jocular, and ultimately lyrical interplay of paintings, video, and sculptures based on Hogarth’s A Midnight Modern Conversation, 1773, represents a symbolic