“Deterioration, They Said” brought together a group of artists who belong to the MTV generation, having grown up with early forms of the video aesthetic and the ascendant technologies of the 1980s and ’90s. The formative years of Cory Arcangel, Jessica and Jacob Ciocci/Paper Rad, Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, and Shana Moulton were dominated by both television and the Internet, with their cornucopia of possibilities for reproduction and interconnectedness. Their works constitute a retort to those cultural critics who charge that the surfeit of information inevitably leads both to desensitization

What was so appealing about the Chiharu Shiota installation A Long Day, 2009, is the way the artist transformed the white cube into something completely unrecognizable. As is usual for her, this Japanese artist from Berlin filled the space by spinning a web of wool yarn that appeared penetrable but in fact took over everything. Behind the tangle of black, you could hear the clicking of computer keyboards and scraps of telephone conversations. The gallery had vanished behind the work. No going forward—that’s where the yarn was—but to retreat would just have meant walking back out of the gallery.