Do we need a survey of new American art in London? That’s the question one asked before venturing to “The Americans: New Art” at the Barbican. The title suggested “Move over YBAs,” a sentiment addressed to a London media for whom contemporary art is still wholly synonymous with the late Britpack phenomenon. The reality is that over the last few years we’ve had plenty of opportunities in London to see the work of young artists from the US in galleries such as Corvi-Mora, greengrassi, Sadie Coles HQ, and White Cube, not to mention Charles Saatchi’s two-part 1998 show “Young Americans” (though the

Collectors, save this issue! The review you are reading will soon be an artwork, or part of one—not my art, of course, since I’m not (yet) one of those critics who’s been tempted to cross over, but that of the anonymous collective known as The Three, a band of women said to make their living as fashion models (“with the same London agency where artist Mariko Mori modeled”). Their work is about as austerely conceptual as you can imagine. They don’t make anything—no paintings, of course, but also no videos, objects, or texts. They don’t do anything—not only do they not perform or even organize

It is easy to see why much of the comment that circulates around Keith Tyson’s work focuses on his interest in science. The techspeak and strings of figures that frequently appear in his innumerable drawings point time and again to the fields of astronomy and particle physics, to the cellular structure of the body, to ideas of randomness, and so on. Yet his drawings have more in common with the doodles that one used to do on the inside cover of one’s science folder at school whenever the lessons got a bit dull. And a child’s penchant for writing his address by beginning with name, house, and