Sam Taylor-Wood makes big photographs. I like photographs that are small, made to be viewed in books or, ideally, held in one’s hands, destined to be turned, caressed, and scrutinized up close. In such experiences lies something like the essence of photography, for me. And thus I do not like Sam Taylor-Wood’s photographs.

Of course, Taylor-Wood’s images were never intended to be exceedingly photographic. They flirt with cinema (the panoramic horizontal expanse, “sound tracks,” and temporal dilation of the “Five Revolutionary Seconds” series, 1995–98). They dally with theater (the play with

“Raymond Hains, la tentative”: The very title of the show—“Raymond Hains: The Attempt”—underscores the difficulties involved in mounting a Hains retrospective. The first challenge is posed by the sheer variety of the artist’s oeuvre, from his photographs taken through fluted lenses and the tom posters he first realized with Jacques de la Villeglé in 1949, to his Nouveau Réaliste work alongside Yves Klein in the ’60s, to his recent collages of digital images, “Macintoshages,” 1997-. The second hurdle is Hains himself who has long avoided participation in a retrospective, leaving the

Literary critic Lucien Dallenbach, who has previously written on Balzac, Claude Simon, and the Nouveau Roman, among other things, recently proposed a new metaphor for contemporary society: What if today’s world took the form of a mosaic? Indeed, this ancient art is making a strong comeback of late: From the patchwork screens of CNN to the parceled urbanism of New York and Marseilles, from models for the structure of genes to the covers of magazines, or by way of the fragmented and kaleidoscopic narratives of today’s novels, the mosaic has imposed itself as a form that structures our world,