Like well worn jeans we've gown comfortable in the softness of Tillmans, and so one would wish to find some sort of hard take to revitalize and refresh the practice, but one doesn't exist. Everyone loves Wolfgang. Tillman's activism was so couched in beauty and positivity as to be almost unremarkable, its seamy undercarriage was this trojan aspect, of looking fashionably pleasant while remaining avant in the subtle radicality taped up in constellations of subjects with a Tillmansesque grace that was unpretentious and gentle and modular, placable over a rotating set of subjects conjuring a loveliness almost overbearing, saccharine. But the rise of instagram with it the "small subject" that had seemed so radical then has become defacto as "unpretentious" photography is the ocean we tread weary, the artist having created the fashion that has come to obsolesce him, Tillmans will eventually amass a lifetime of them, these small moments, able to outpace the fashion.
Wolfgang Tillmans at David Zwirner, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner,
