By nature, as Aristotle said, people desire to know, and for this reason we love our sense of sight. But since we further desire knowledge beyond the limits of our unaided senses, and beyond the different limits set by ethical scruples and social convention, we also love the artificial sense organs we have devised: first and foremost, the camera. According to this exhibition’s organizer, Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (where the show will travel in October before concluding at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in spring 2011), “We

John Latham, who died in 2006 at the age of eighty-four, remains best known for encouraging students at Saint Martins School of Art to chew up pages from the library’s copy of Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture and returning the book as fermented spittle. The action (organized with Barry Flanagan) cost Latham his part-time job and established his provocative and, some might say, profoundly unscholarly reputation. Several exhibitions in London this past summer showed that it is the right moment to reassess Latham’s work and influence, not only beyond the Greenberg-chewing story but also, crucially,

Tacita Dean’s new film, Craneway Event, 2009, is a 108-minute edit of a three-day rehearsal that Merce Cunningham led with his dance company in late 2008. Set in a disused factory on San Francisco Bay, the film pays unabashed homage to the late, then eighty-nine-year-old dance legend, who directs from a wheelchair with immense dignity. He is ever attentive and respectful toward his accomplished dancers, who move in silhouette against a wall of vast industrial windows overlooking a busy port. Behind the dancers ferryboats drift by; a pelican flies past. The sun rises and sets on these quietly