IN JUNE, NEW YORK’S MUSEUM OF MODERN ART WENT DARK to put the finishing touches on its contentious five-year expansion, which promised to put $450 million and 47,000 square feet of Diller Scofidio + Renfro architecture toward fostering a “deeper experience of art” across boundaries of media, geography, and identity. Today, MoMA emerges from its chrysalis a bigger, brighter, and supposedly more progressive institution. Gone—we are told—is the stiff, developmentalist progression from ism to ism, the residual investment in medium specificity, the instinctive parochialism, the cult of white male

THIS SUMMER, New York was introduced to one of the most renowned avant-garde works of the Argentine ’60s: La Menesunda. The New Museum’s exhibition “Menesunda Reloaded” reconstructed all the outlandish elements of this labyrinthine circuit, from its confetti blitzes and spinning cage to its incandescent tunnel of neon lights. Originally created in 1965 by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín, the environment marked a watershed moment in Argentine art; its kitsch aesthetic, technological components, and participatory nature shattered notions of art established by local art academies and recent

THE FIRST ROOM OF “TIMESHARE,” Liz Magor’s recent exhibition at the 500 Capp Street Foundation, was dim and crowded with furniture, boxes, moving blankets, and stacked belongings. A narrow strait allowed visitors to thread through these items to the other side, to look back at the assembled contents of a life: treasures, jetsam, desiderata. A small white dog––fabricated from polyester resin––was sheltered beneath a table like a cowering sentry. The low light gave this most recent iteration of Magor’s ongoing installation One Bedroom Apartment, 1996–, a decidedly melancholic cast, redoubled by

A FEW WEEKS AGO, MY WECHAT FEED was flooded by the same message: Pace is closing its Beijing outpost. In an interview with Artnews, the gallery’s founder, Arne Glimcher, observed, “It’s impossible to do business in mainland China right now and it has been for a while.” Glimcher attributed this stagnation of business, on the one hand, to the recent rise in trade tariffs and, on the other, to China’s economic slowdown. As a former associate director of Pace Beijing, I cannot help but reminisce about that summer evening eleven years ago—a week before the start of the Beijing Olympics—at the opening

The following letter is addressed to Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, curators of the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The signatories submitted it to Artforum for public release.

Dear Ru and Jane,

We respectfully ask you to withdraw our work from the Whitney Biennial for the remainder of the show. This request is intended as condemnation of Warren Kanders’ continued presence as Vice Chair of the Board. We would appreciate if you presented this letter to the Board to let them know the seriousness of the situation.

We care deeply about the Whitney. Over the years, many shows at the Museum have inspired and

WARREN B. KANDERS DIDN’T EARN HIS PLACE as vice chair of the board at the Whitney Museum of American Art through his good taste alone. He has also used some of his estimated $700 million fortune to make tax-deductible donations to support exhibitions at the museum. What successful enterprise has made this generosity possible? Thanks to the collective, years-long effort of activists, students, and reporters to bring everyday brutality to light, we could tell you quite a lot about Kanders’s company Safariland, which does a brisk trade supplying batons, handcuffs, holsters, and body armor to police

I FLASH my SFMOMA lifetime artist membership card, and the woman at the counter asks me, “What do you have in the collection?” Her question gets me tense. A few months after the museum sent me the card in the mail—a total surprise—some brainiac in acquisitions questioned my eligibility, and they threatened to revoke my membership. See me on the phone, shouting at a museum bureaucrat, “You’ve got to be kidding me! This is beyond tacky.” I do not know if this cheerful woman now is just being chatty or if this is a test. I tell her my husband has a piece in the Kikibox. She looks confused and asks,

IN MARCH, Isaac Julien’s show “Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass” premiered at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, a week before it opened at Metro Pictures in New York during Armory Week. I caught a flight upstate for a weekend of events surrounding the debut and was toured around sites important both to Douglass’s life and to Julien’s process, including the George Eastman Museum, the graves of Anna Murray Douglass and Douglass, and Highland Park—the location of a 120-year-old bronze statue of Douglass, the first public monument in the country to memorialize a black American. Julien’s

WE ARE THE GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHES YOU WEREN’T ABLE TO BURN, declared a banner at this year’s International Women’s Day march in Zagreb, Croatia. As if to illustrate this illicit genealogy, two schoolgirls, accompanied by their mother, carried a sign proclaiming, WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE RESISTANCE. These slogans handily describe the expansive oeuvre of Zagreb-based artist Sanja Iveković, who, unsurprisingly, was spotted among the event’s attendees. Since the beginning of Iveković’s artistic career in the 1970s in socialist Yugoslavia, she has sought to prevent the erasure of women’s

ONE NIGHT IN THE SUMMER OF 2017, a few weeks before neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, I ran into a well-liked art adviser at a party on the second floor of New York’s Russian Samovar. We knew each other vaguely and greeted each other warmly. The well-liked art adviser asked what I was writing. I answered that I was working on an investigative piece with some relevance to the art world.

“Oh?”

I asked if the art adviser was familiar with the Sackler family.

“The Sacklers, yes, of course. I work with them sometimes.” The art adviser then added, whispering: “And yes, I know all about where the

“IT’S A SPACESHIP,” the artist Alejandro Jodorowsky told me long ago. “An astronomical technology designed to measure the power of light and of darkness. An architectural machine made to take off, destined to fly and to take our souls and our dreams beyond the Earth.” He was speaking about Notre Dame. Looking at the cathedral from its rear, Jodorowsky compared the stone buttresses to the arms that attach to a shuttle on its launchpad, meant to open one day to let the ship rise into the sky. I had a hard time understanding his theory then. But suddenly we were there, together with hundreds of

BEING A PEDESTRIAN IN LA has long put a person outside the bounds of normality: At best, they’ve made a mistake, gotten a DUI, failed to maintain their car, or crashed it; at worst, they’re already an offender, a trespasser, a prowler, or merely too poor to be considered at all.

Oliver Payne’s recent travelogue-lecture-performance-video Wandering About Falling Down, 2019, is a meditation on this unique combination of being both overexposed and totally invisible. This past February 26, viewers could catch up with Payne on Instagram Live as he crossed the city. Where was he at lunch? Where was he