The word on Simon Periton’s intricate, often aggressively colored paper cutouts was always that their success hinged on the contrast between the cozily domestic associations of their artsy-craftsy medium—he was never averse to calling them doilies—and the punky, sometimes blatantly sensational choice of motifs, from skulls and anarchy symbols to riot scenes and the Ramones, which tied his oeuvre to that of the YBAs. But I never saw it that way. What interested me was how his best work made you forget both what its imagery represented (often hard to make out anyway, given its reduction

As the video I’m Short, Your House, 2007, closes, a voice tells us that today, “Not only do works of art end up as commodities, but there is also an overwhelming sense in which works of art start off as commodities.” The quote is from the Australian conceptual artist Ian Burn, but on-screen, the source of the voice seems to be a shadow in the shape of an animal head, made by a hand. Stephan Dillemuth and Nils Norman use simple means to create a caricatured realm akin to Karl Marx’s “inverted world where Mr. Capital and Madame Real Estate dance their macabre dance.” The setting of the video is

After realizing that it was impossible to take complete written notes of the innumerable details in Graham Hudson’s installation—including a jumble of wooden boxes filled with lit bare lightbulbs, handsaws, two-by-fours, and other debris; multilevel crate flooring; rolls of striped packing tape dangling from the ceiling; a broken swivel chair transformed into a functioning electric lamp topped with a white paperbag “lampshade”—I then discovered that every careless photograph I took of the work came out looking ravishing. In photographs, the whole gallery-size installation, This sculpture