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Presciently, Bruce Hainley understood early, eerily, the limitations of interest in Rosen’s work in a review based on a sole photograph in a single show when the artist was still working in physical space. Hainley muses on discerning acts of “grooming” from “genuine distress,” reaching out for “contact,” the review reads as sage advice/stern warning to the young artist more than addressing Artforum readers.
But despite Hainley’s parable to a young artist, we are today left with Rosen gathering artworld consecrators to be"pleased to announce [their] cooperation in the presentation of an exhibition." “Exhibition” now mere name listed: Hainley, Midway Contemporary Art, New Museum, now Kite; you’d be hard pressed to find a higher end roster. Its nihilistic critique asserting that names on a list are the real base of art, reductio ad absurdum. A game of gathering artworld credibility, that Hainley acknowledged his complicity with, in which you are a pawn with one distinct choice, of saying yes or no, but after that the moves are all already preloaded into Rosen’s game.
Like Codax, or Green Tea Gallery, it’s hard not to be cynical about its “institutional critique” - revealing the cred-network - as anything but press building, self-mythology.
Read Hainley's here.