So what happened this year.
Painting got worse. The techno-conceptual gasped its dying crescendo of interest - but likely not money -in lavish SciFi fantasy film sets sprawling across gallery floors - Matthew Barney excess without its libidinal bucket. (This will probably get worse.) The bodily lumpen material thing continued its trench. Jordan Wolfson didn't release anything interesting. Pantone colors still reign in young painting - Duplo colors in adult. Painting continues to treat bodies as rebar, maybe more-so. (Atomically correct would look refreshing.) We continued rearranging our museums to pretend they were like this all along. "Better late than never" became the only phrase we could scrape together. Still couldn't muster that often. Petzel gave a solo show to a black artist for the first time in their 25 years? (Still can't believe this is true, is this true?) Teenage bedroom motifs still an undercurrent not quite peaking and poor Rob Pruitt. I thought about Park McArthur's foam a lot. "Online viewing room" an immediately stale punchline, people saying it with straight face insulting, serving it like we'd continue to love gruel. Art publications all too happy to repeat it. Everyone immediately bored with it, digital fairs just like why - Essex Street said something like "no limits on space, size, or shipping, and this is what we get?" The most transgressive art continues to be photos of Kanye. (This is fine.) Ser Serpas. More documentation of people wearing VR gear, lol. Paintings like Tarot cards on an iPad, still. Zwirner's PR for Josh Smith's rooftop won the award for full self-ass-suck. Trevor Shimizu started making pretty paintings, instead of kitty coprophagia. Salman Toor today, so Salman Toor tomorrow. I can't tell if neo-primitiv-animism is on the way out or way in. Less surrealism, but still way too much. Everything boring in comparison to the news, like an eclipse, and art like roaches scrambling in confusion to exposure.
