Just how many skills is a twenty-first-century artist expected to master? If Michael Fullerton is the measure, then—per his recent exhibition “Columbia”—the contemporary artist must be an expert researcher, writer, draftsman, storyteller, sleuth, technician, and sculptor. He must work with readymades, video, lasers, painting, printing, and wall text. He must be sociopolitically and historically astute—in Fullerton’s case, about Alan Turing, the brilliant computer-technology pioneer who, after helping Britain win the war with his code-cracking genius, was convicted of homosexuality and cruelly

There have been more than a few processions in art in the past decade or so; actual performances aside, one recalls the cinematic one in William Kentridge’s animated Shadow Procession, 1999, for instance, as well as the motionless sequence of rhesus monkeys in Chris Ofili’s suite of paintings The Upper Room, 2002. Like those parades carved in marble on Roman pediments or represented in mosaics on the walls of Byzantine churches, such works depict triumphs of one sort or another—but contemporary triumphal processions tend to be heavily ironic. Kentridge’s film, as critic George Baker has noted,