The best things I have read while hunkered down are some emails from friends—best as in critical, hard to shake. Here are a couple of examples.
Hal Foster’s new book What Comes After Farce surveys decades of art history and theory in three thematic sections: “Terror and Transgression,” “Plutocracy and Display,” and “Media and Fiction.” In one essay, “Exhibitionists,” Foster cites Robert Smithson’s remark, key for the historicization of the first wave of institutional critique, that the task of artists is to demonstrate the apparatuses they are “threaded through.” Today, acknowledging the widespread lack of cultural funding and the precariousness of cultural producers generally speaking, not to mention the already long-ago understanding of radical art’s recuperability, Foster proceeds to speculate on the (im)possibilities of critique, when, as he allows, many artists and...