(“A Fatal Attraction” at Barbara Weiss, Rebecca Morris at The Blaffer Art Museum)
"Shopping seems to merge into everything, everything seems to merge into shopping. Even its critique. Arguably no sphere is effected more forcefully by this paradox than the contemporary art world, where the line between opposition and opportunism has become all but blurred."
"A Fatal Attraction alludes to an exhibition which Thomas Lawson curated in 1982 at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago. [...] We are trapped firmly within the terms of a fatal attraction, Lawson wrote in the catalogue of the exhibition, unable to say ‘no’ with any conviction."
Everything adopts the language of the commodity, this is what we find "nice," painting offers itself like a platter of its possibility. Like any good commodity, like any brilliant bright sponge on store shelves, the object provides a possibility. Morris's paintings offer themselves like catalogs for more. And the "no" in Jeffery's, that hollow space of the refusal's whisper, still contains it within a package that frames it. The distance, this evaporation, the whisper, is its commodity, a pleasant silence, selling a rest it spills over.