You’re going to want to try it, so here’s the recipe for Roger Hiorns’s The Birth of the Architect (all works 2003): Take one BMW 8-series car engine and two small cardboard models of cathedrals—preferably Notre Dame and Cologne. Lower into a bath of copper sulfate solution and steep for three consecutive nights, turning occasionally. Remove, shake gently, and serve on a pair of steel plinths set at different heights, with the engine’s cables—now encrusted, like everything else, with sparkling blue crystals—dangling down like an umbilical cord toward the cathedrals. The result should burst

Baudelaire, as everyone knows, advised the critic to adopt “an exclusive point of view” but with the proviso: “provided the one adopted opens up the widest horizons.” Today, when a chic eclecticism seems seductive to so many painters, one wants to issue them a similar warning: Let your technique be as narrow as the eye of a needle—as long as a realm wide as heaven awaits on the other side. (Of course, you’ll never be sure until you’ve passed through it.) One model could be Alexis Harding, who’s been achieving divergent effects of great specificity through a single method he’s used since the