A STORY OF DECEPTION, 2003–2006, consists of a painting sliced in half and a film loop of a highway shot from the front of a car. The car straddles a dashed white center-line. In the middle distance, we see the glimmer of an oily mirage hovering above the scalding pavement. As the vehicle inches forward, the mirage evaporates, only to grow larger at the horizon, where the road dissolves. The car moves deliberately, slowly, as if toward a destination. It goes nowhere. Nothing changes.

A Story of Deception was an apt introduction to the mind of an artist whose practice revolves around the representation

BE GENTLE WITH THE EDGES OF THE WORLD read the sign that greeted visitors as they entered Ernesto Neto’s recent exhibition, whose subtitle was precisely “The Edges of the World.” Several more such signs reminding viewers to be gentle with this or that would be encountered as one wandered between the walls and under the ceilings constructed using Neto’s signature stretchy translucent nylon that made up much of this show, which felt more like a multipart installation than a grouping of separate works. Of course, the injunction was to some extent a reflection of the fact that although Neto has long

What’s the real object of curator Todd Levin’s exhibition “Joseph Cornell Karen Kilimnik”? There are no surprises at the level of individual works; the Cornell boxes and collages typify the artist’s later, sparer, post-1940s style, while almost all the Kilimniks (from 1989 to the present) are familiar from a flurry of solo shows around the world over the past decade. And Levin’s installation—gallery walls painted ultramarine, velvet trimmings, lashings of glitter, all looking way slicker in reproduction than in actuality—is classic Kilimnik too.

Some London reviewers have been busy with the idea

On the smooth, gridded surface of a black plastic cutting mat, a tiny drama unfolds. A slender prod, coated in some kind of putty and manipulated by an unseen hand, shoves a little gray ball into the center of the frame. This accomplished, the tool moves offscreen, only to return with a slightly larger ball coated in bright orange fuzz. With no small amount of effort, and after several unsuccessful attempts, it eventually contrives to stack one sphere atop the other. And for a final trick, it places the now conjoined forms atop a diminutive octagonal column. Three further endeavors follow a