TRUE TO ITS FUNCTION as a naming ceremony of sorts, Nicolas Bourriaud’s Tate Triennial aimed at nothing less than inaugurating an alternative modernity. It understood itself as both harbinger and incarnation of this new cultural constellation and was premised on what Bourriaud calls “the emerging and ultimately irresistible will to create a form of modernism for the twenty-first century.” Fittingly for an exhibition predicated on a ringing declaration of a new epoch, “Altermodern” was surrounded on all sides by gestures of initiation, programmatic statements, and declarations of intent that

The third and final film in Lindsay Seers’s elaborate installation, “It has to be this way,” 2009, shows art critic Michael Newman intelligently critiquing the work itself, discussing the connection between memory and technology and thus memory’s inherently prosthetic quality. It’s very good stuff; so what’s left for a reviewer to do? Viewers of the three DVD works that made up the exhibition could only conclude that Seers is so savvy about her art’s theoretical underpinnings that she virtually hands us every critical or historical comment to be made about it; it feels intellectually self-conscious

A decade and a half after his death, Ray Johnson continues to occupy the marginal yet thoroughly involved position he held in life. The growing list of exhibitions and writings about his work serves to clarify rather than alter our understanding of the deliberate distance he maintained from the mechanisms of the art market, heightening our appreciation of the perspicacity with which he observed those workings. His conflicts with the fixed ideas of what constitutes an artist’s career have only gained in significance with time.

Johnson’s reliance on the postal system as a means to share his ideas