The metaphor of “cultural translation” has been a favorite theme of cultural criticism and art discourse for some time. And in fact the processes of appropriation and translation, and their attendant displacements of cultural and contextual meaning, do belong to the defining experiences of contemporary life. In Peter Doig’s exhibition “StudioFilmClub,” which traveled to the Kunsthalle Zürich after being seen in Cologne, the metaphor of cultural translation played several key roles: The Scottish-born painter who now resides in Trinidad presented seventy-six hand-painted film posters displayed

Merlin Carpenter’s exhibitions are always attempts to step outside the bounds of the “realm of the possible”—that is, the current conventions of the art industry—the better to criticize them. His latest show continued this attack on art-world consensus but at the same time demonstrated that one still has to deal with the reigning norms, to engage them somehow. His attack this time was, in the first instance, one on the posthumous canonization of the Martin Kippenberger currently being hailed as a painterly genius at the expense of the “conceptual” Kippenberger, whose project was in essence not