art – greg.org

It’s No Joke

a glenn ligon edition on white paper in a white frame on a white wall has black marker lines crossing out all the text of a richard prince joke painting study except the last, "Black man: what you kickin' about, you white, ain't you?" the title is punchline, 2024 via hauser & wirth — Glenn Ligon, Punchline, 2024, Digital image with hand-drawn additions in marker, 12 x 9 in., ed. 12/25 +10 APs, photo: © Glenn Ligon, Ron Amstutz via Hauser & Wirth

One thing I love about this edition [which greg.org hero Matt tipped me off about] in Glenn Ligon’s new show of works on paper at Hauser & Wirth , is that Ligon did not use the digital image of the 1989 study from Punchlines, Sotheby’s themed online sale of Richard Prince jokes in December 2023 as the base for his hand-drawn redactions.

a 1989 richard prince taped together collage of a cropped text of two jokes on white paper in a white frame on a white wall at sotheby's in 2023, where one joke is about a hippie hitchhiker being mistaken for a girl and finna be raped by a trucker, and the other joke is about a white man who complains like job about losing everything, and a Black man saying, yeah but you're still white. — Richard Prince, Untitled (Study for Joke Painting), 1989, ballpoint pen, tape and printed paper on paper,
12 by 9 in., sold at Sotheby’s 15 Dec 2023 for $7,620

Ligon’s image of Prince’s printed, clipped, annotated, taped, three-layer study has different shadows along the edges of the collage, so a different lighting situation than when Sotheby’s photographed it. Did Ligon photograph it while on view? Did he buy it? That would be some praxis. [And with an edition of 25, a great ROI.]

The dimensions of Ligon’s edition and Prince’s study are identical—and I love how Ligon signs his in a way that echoes Prince. But that’s just the dimension of the sheet; in fact, Ligon is presenting his work, Punchline (2024), in an identical frame, too. The facsimile objecthood is strong with this one.

Except, of course, Ligon’s intervention completely transforms the work. It’s not that his crossouts eliminate the rape and racist jokes; you can still make them out, if you’re determined to. But he changes entirely the delivery and impact of the punchline [sic], which is not, of course, much of a punchline at all.

When I went looking to see if Prince ever made a painting with this double joke printed 16 inches wide, I didn’t find one. But I did find one of Prince’s joke sources: The Official Black Joke Book/The Official White Joke Book, a 1975 addition to a long series of Official [Some Target Group] Joke Books by Larry Wilde. [So far, the text of the hippie hitchhiker joke does not appear anywhere online outside of Prince’s own oeuvre.]

Ligon recomposes the text, but also reauthors it in ways that matter, and that highlight the mechanisms of appropriation. In his Cariou deposition Prince talks about wanting “to be a girlfriend,” wanting dreads and to be a Rasta he saw at a bar in St. Barth. And when he can’t, he says, “Maybe I should paint them. Maybe that’s a way to substitute that desire.” Now there’s a thread to pull on, which runs through Prince’s work, but also through the white male gaze culture he was soaking in and drawing from.

Text, appropriation, painting, history, racialized experience, queerness. This one print has me questioning whose tools are being used here, whose house is being dismantled, and what’s being built in its place. I’m not sure there’s another artist working now who could make so little into so much.

Glenn Ligon: Late at night, early in the morning, at noon, is at Hauser & Wirth @ the Roxy from 15 January until 4 April 2026 [hauserwirth]
Punchlines: 18 Jokes by Richard Prince, 15 Dec 2023, Lot 18 [sothebys]

Los Ladrillos de Étant donnés

a black and white photo of a rustic wooden door set into a flat brick arch on a rough stucco wall, the exterior view, the only one permitted, of marcel duchamp's etant donnes at the philadelphia museum of art — Marcel Duchamp Exterior of Étant donnés, 1946-66, as installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Mixed-media assemblage, published by Michael R. Taylor via

I realize that he spent twenty years working on Étant donnés, so why does it still surprise me that Marcel Duchamp sourced the door AND the bricks for the arch from BF Spain?

a grainy black and white snapshot of a small white woman in a black summer dress posed next to a large rustic wood door in a larger brick arch doorway and wall, in a rural village in spain, from the archive of marcel duchamp and his wife teeny's visit in the early 1960s, now at the philadelphia museum of art — Marcel Duchamp, snapshot of exterior door of *Étant donnés* in its original setting, with Teeny Duchamp, La Bisbal, early 1960s, collection The Philadelphia Museum of Art Archives, published by Michael Taylor, via

The door came from a town called La Bisbal, where Marcel and Teeny went doorscouting in the early 1960s, I guess? It was only in the summer of 1968, though, that Duchamp selected 150 bricks for the doorway arch, to be shipped to the US by a contractor in Cadaqués, his regular vacation spot. [Presumably, Duchamp was trying to match the crumbled brick wall already included in the work, which frames the nude mannequin and landscape. presumably brought back from Spain at some earlier date.

a black and white photo of a rustic wood door from spain, with a row of three square brick-patterned vinyl tiles above it, right up against an absolutely generic modern office building door and doorway, a december 1968 documentary photo by denise brown hare of marcel duchamp's last artwork etant donnes, before it was moved to the philadelphia museum of art — Denise Browne Hare, 11th St installation of Étant donnés, with vinyl brick tiles, December 1968, from a documentation portfolio published for the first time in 2009 by Michael Taylor via

Until the bricks arrived, Duchamp put up a row of brick-shaped vinyl tiles as placeholders in the 11th St studio where the Étant donnés diorama was constructed (or reconstructed, because he’d already had to move it once).

Duchamp, of course, never took delivery of the bricks. He died in October 1968, and in anticipation of the disassembly and move of Étant donnés, Teeny had it photographed by Denise Browne Hare in December.

The bricks, meanwhile, went on their own convoluted journey, and the shipping and customs delays getting them caused weeks of drama for the Philadelphia Museum, which was rushing to secretly install the work before word got out—and before Teeny left to Spain for the summer.

It’s so chill now, but the entire saga of Étant donnés is buck wild, from the secrecy of its creation; the logistics of its acquisition and installation; the sheer institutional freakout over its existence, voyeur/creeper and nudity factors; and the paranoia and draconian constraints over its documentation and reproduction.

They all culminate in the tragicomedy of, of all people, Arturo Schwarz, Duchamp’s dealer and the editor of his catalogue raisonné, WHICH WAS READY TO GO, only finding out about the existence of Étant donnés as it was being dismantled in NYC and shipped to Philadelphia, and literally writing the CR text on it at the museum as soon as it opened to the public. He then proceeded to politely rage for permission to photograph the work for the second edition of the CR, which the museum was absolutely too terrified to do. Schwarz was forced to reproduce bootleg snapshots taken through the work’s peephole.

The sweet irony is that all this extraordinary detail is laid out in full in Michael R. Taylor’s 2009 book, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés. The Genesis, Construction, Installation, and Legacy of a Secret Masterwork, published on the work’s 40th anniversary by the Philadelphia Museum. I have a copy somewhere, but it’s so much easier to read on this heroic Slovenian artist’s website [shruggie emoji].

Hilton Als on Johns’s Little Guys

jasper johns, perilous night, 1990, is a vertically oriented revisiting of the right half of a pair of 1982 drawings of the same name. this one is neater, but still watery. two pages of the score of john cage's perilous night and a disembodied hand and arm print (facing down) sit in a black and grey background segmented by tracery that hints at another drawing, maybe with a sword, probably a detail from the isenheim altarpiece. but the pale green band at the bottom with three stick figures holding paint brushes renders the grey field as the sky instead. via matthew marks gallery, which showed it in 2024 — Jasper Johns, *Perilous Night*, 1990, Watercolor and ink on paper, 30½ × 23¼ in., on view at Matthew Marks in 2024

I really wished I’d seen the show of Jasper Johns drawings at Matthew Marks when I went deep on the little stick figures motif. Perilous Night, a 1990 watercolor, was the earliest of several works in the show in which the little guys appeared.

And I REALLY wish I’d gotten the catalogue immediately, because I just picked it up this afternoon, and Hilton Als had this to say about the stick figures in Perilous Night:

The right side of this watercolor and ink on paper is a replica of a score by John Cage, a close friend of Johns for many years. Cage wrote “Perilous Night” in 1943 and 1944. A composition for a prepared piano, it’s an angry piece whose strong rhythms speak to us emotionally—he was going through a difficult time with his then wife, the surrealist artist Xenia Cage—even as we understand that Cage is asking questions about what the piano can and cannot do. Who’s to say? In Johns’s piece, the sheet music floats against an abstract field made up of vertical shapes that reach up, up, up toward the top of the page. On the bottom of the work, a strip of green field. Three little stick figures stand on that green, gesticulating. Who are they? What are they? Fallen notes from Cage’s score?(Johns doesn’t render the notes in Cage’s score; all we see are traces of notes.) Or are those tiny figures from Johns’s and Cage’s past? Johns’s Perilous Night is an exercise, too, in depth—an experiment that challenges Johns’s famous flatness. One image tells us about another: the sheet music leads us to the abstraction, and the abstraction leads us to that little strip of green. It’s a work that’s giddy with possibility, a kind of “what if” piece. What if I put a little green here? And figures there? What happens to the work? To the eye? To the eye of the ideas?

Mark Rothko okhtoR kraM

a pale screenprint in light gray rectangles floats in a large horizontal sheet. a small black text marlborough in the upper left corner, and mark rothko in large letters in the center, twice but overlapping in such a way that they're mirrored, making it all illegible. but rb kitaj, who made this print of a photo of a transparent dust jacket, gave a hint in the title. — R.B. Kitaj, Marlborough (Mark Rothko), 1969-70, screenprint, 19×17 in. on 23 x 30 sheet or so, from a 50-print portfolio in an ed. 150, image via MoMA, who photographed the whole sheet

While factchecking for a panel, I stumbled across this wild screenprint, Marlborough (Mark Rothko) (1969-70), by R. B. Kitaj.

It’s from a portfolio of 50 screenprints Kitaj made in London, In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part, that reproduces book covers from Kitaj’s own library. In Our Time includes some rare edition deep cuts, but overall, Kitaj seems to select covers as both aesthetic and found objects, rather than [just] for literary reference.

a deep purple painting with a cracked and ragged thin white line down the center, a depiction of the cover of a barnett newman exhibition catalogue by david diao, where the wear of the spine becomes a newman-style zip, via greene naftali gallery — David Diao, BN Spine (2), 2013, acrylic and silkscreen, 72 x 100 in., image via Greene Naftali

That means many prints that show the age and wear of covers, not just the design, which reminded me of David Diao’s painting based on his copy of a Barnett Newman catalogue, where the worn spine becomes a jagged zip.

But nothing else matched the manipulated, mirroring of this Rothko print, which seemed to have its own ghostly Rothko composition, turned sideways. Until I realized that Kitaj didn’t manipulate anything. The print depicts, not the cover of Marlborough’s 1964 exhibition catalogue, but its printed mylar dust jacket.

a crappy snapshot of a softcover catalogue for a 1964 marlborough gallery exhibition of mark rothko paintings depicts a red and orange rothko on the cover, with a mylar dust jacket wrapped around it, printed with the gallery and artist name, via an abebooks seller in argentina, but it could be anywhere — Marlborough Mark Rothko (Feb-March 1964) via abebooks

NGA has all 50 prints in Kitaj’s In Our Time portfolio [nga.gov]
MoMA seems to only have 47, but at least photographs the whole sheet [moma]
“Kitaj jokingly referred to these repurposed book covers as his ‘soup can.'” [buffaloakg]
The Huntington showed some In Our Time prints in 2024 [huntington.org]
Seems hard to keep a set of 50 prints together, or to get more than $200 apiece for them [rago/toomey]

Cy Twombly Not Writing

a brushy mottled dark green background of an 8 by 12 foot painting has several washed white loops like cursive ls or calligraphy, each marked by long thin vertical drips of the watery paint. note 1 by cy twombly at sfmoma — Cy Twombly, Note I, 2005-07, acrylic on three wood panels in artist frame, 98 x 146 in., photo by Ian Reeves, collection SFMOMA

Thierry Greub’s research on the inscriptions in Cy Twombly’s work fills multiple volumes. Dean Rader wrote an entire book of poems from experiencing Twombly’s work. Reading Greub’s essay on Rader’s book and being caught in the flow of Twombly’s writing, I found myself suddenly stuck on the marks on this painting, Note I from III Notes from Salalah (2005-07).

They look like letters—Greub calls them, “lasso-shaped ‘ls’ and ‘es’ of Twombly’s writing-evoking traces of painting.” When the Art Institute showed the series in 2009, James Rondeau made reference to the “pseudo-writing” of the blackboard paintings, and to how the loops and apostrophe-like strokes interpreted “the calligraphic nature of printed Arabic.”

Honestly, I’m fine either/or/and/also, but I am just stymied by how they were made. The strokes on the right seem to start from the right, but each loop/stroke seems to start from the left. And the strokes on the left seem to start from the left. The point is, I think the strokes and drips tell this entire story of their making, yet they are not written. They look like letters or calligraphy, but they’re not made by writing.

cy twombly's loopy dgaf handwritten poster for his show, 3 notes from salalah at larry gagosian galley [heh] via crispi 16 dec 15, feb 16, all in fat blue india ink brush, and then roma written in like ballpoint pen in the bottom right corner, in case you didn't know where via crispi was, loser. this poster from 2008 is now for sale at the gagosian shop for 1250 us dollars — vs. Cy Twombly writing: Three Notes from Salalah exhibition poster from Gagosian Rome, 2008, via Gagosian Shop

The Art Institute goes on, “Although ostensibly based on writing, the paintings are also specifically indebted to place,” and then heads straight to the lush, green, tropical landscape of Salalah in Oman. Meanwhile, the only place I can picture is Twombly’s tiny storefront studio in downtown Lexington, Virginia where the series was painted. Because each Note is three wood panels, each 8×4 feet, like sheets of plywood, joined together, into a massive wall. Did he join them first? Or join two and add one later? Could the studio even fit all three Notes at once? Twombly made these when he was 80. The mind may reel, but it’s nothing compared to Twombly’s arm.

“What burns through existence to endlessness?” Dean Rader’s Meditations on Cy Twombly [ronslate]

To Save And Project And Premiere: Unseen Warhol Films at MoMA

a grainy black and white film still of jack smith, a young white guy with a closely trimmed beard and villain mustage leaning on the chest of a white woman in a darker satin top, with the cropped head torso hand of another white person with dark hair is laying upside down, an image from the warhol film batman dracula, as processed and presented by moma film dept and the andy warhol museum

Incredible. MoMA will close the latest installment of its film preservation series, To Save and Project, with a mountain of never-before-seen footage from Andy Warhol and The Factory. There were more than eighty 100-ft rolls of exposed black & white film in Warhol’s archive that had never been developed. Turns out it includes several Screen Tests, material from the shoots of several films [including, I guess, the shot above, of Jack Smith in Batman Dracula], some explicit goings-on from the Factory, and Warhol around town in 1964. Tickets for the February 2nd screening will be released for members on Jan. 19th.

Mon., Feb. 2, 2026: Andy Warhol Exposed: Newly Processed Films from the 1960s [moma.org]
To Save and Project: The 22nd Annual MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation, Jan 8 – Feb 2, 2026 [moma]

Lichtenstein Swiss Cheese Doors Escaped Containment

a slightly sassy thin older white guy in a dress shirt and jeans does a classic contraposto in the gap between slightly open freight elevator doors painted bright yellow, with black and white holes, a cartoonish rendition of swiss cheese. the wall around them is painted a deep royal blue, a matched steel security bar leans against the right wall, which has a section painted black-on-white benday dots, because this is roy lichtenstein in his studio — Roy Lichtenstein posing with his Swiss Cheese freight elevator doors to his loft studio, which appears to be just part of the whole Lichtensteinworld painting scheme.

Swiss Cheese Day was yesterday, and Peter Huestis celebrated on Bluesky by posting about the swiss cheese freight elevator doors Roy Lichtenstein painted in his 29th St. loft in 1984. The loft was sold, probably in the 90s, and the buyer, unsurprisingly, wanted to keep the doors, and so they were entered into Lichtenstein’s catalogue raisonné. The most important part to me, though, was the security bar, painted to match, which did not get a CR entry separate from the doors. If that was all a trip into the Lichtenstein Foundation website yielded, it would have been enough.

a petite white woman in a fanciful red and white printed coat took a selfie in the polished bronze double doors designed by roy lichtenstein to look like swiss cheese at the limestone entry vestibuile of the knapps' 1990s mansion in bel air california. a giant lichtenstein brush totem is reflected behind her, in the center of the mansion's motor court, and behind that, a thick grove of trees. the roy lichtenstein foundation owns the rights to this image and, now that i've posted it without their express written permission, my firstborn child ig — I traded the rights to everything I’ve ever written and my firstborn to the Lichtenstein Foundation so that I could properly celebrate Swiss Cheese Day by illustrating the existential reckoning Roy Lichtenstein left behind with these polished brass and glass doors (1993)

But no. There is another. And another. And another. Lichtenstein made THREE more sets of Swiss cheese doors. They’re dated to 1993, fabricated in 1993-97 [by Jack Brogan, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell’s guy], and only installed, posthumously, in 1998. They were mirror finish bronze, and they were made for two entrances and an elevator in the atrocious house Hugh Newell Jacobsen built in Bel Air for Betsy and Bud Knapp, one-time owners of Architectural Digest and Bon Appetit.

After another artist praised them, I had to reconsider the bronze doors, and I found an explanation that lets me agree: Lichtenstein created these doors so that every time the Knapps entered their 15,000 square-foot home made of fifteen 1,000-square foot post-modern pavilions, they were faced with their own reflections, and compelled to remember that they were people who commissioned three sets of mirror-finish bronze cartoon Swiss cheese doors.

a deceptively intimate village like entrance facade to a 15000 square foot mega mansion made of dozens of little simplified house-shaped modules is sin lit against the cloudless blue sky of bel air california, with the motor court hilariously glowing because it has been wet down for a photo shoot for the 2011 mls real estate listing of the house. the recessed entry has a mirror finish bronze double doorway with black and white hole patterns, like a cartoon swiss cheese, as designed by roy lichtenstein for his collectors, bud and betsy knapp. in a central bricked pit in the middle of the motor court, an uplit sculpture tower, a totem pole of flat, metal, gargantuan cartoon models of brushstrokes in green, yellow, and white, loom against the darkness, another late lichtenstein, from his era where what could be realized far outstripped what should be. via zillow — It makes a village: the wetted motor court of Hugh Newell Jacobsen’s Brobdignagian mutation of his House Pavilion, with a Lichtenstein brushstroke sculpture and a pair of bronze and glass Swiss cheese doors, from the 2011 MLS, still somehow on Zillow in 2026

The Knapps could only endure the self-scrutiny for so long. They put the house on the market in 2011 for $24 million. Nobu bought it in 2013 for $15m, said not my existential terror, and got rid of the doors.

a real estate listing photo of a mahogany colored paneled library with a grey and white jasper johns painting of a target, from 1992, over the fireplace. black leather club chairs, it doesn't matter what else the point of the photo is that people did show their trophy art in their real estate listings at one point. — People really did be having their Jasper Johns Target (1992) in their 2011 LA real estate listings. TBH except for the early Irwin, the art all looks like it was bought new for the house. Which feels very Bel Air.

At least until then they were contained. They now roam the earth who knows where, just waiting to strike again. The Knapps’ Jasper Johns, meanwhile, has, after a couple of stops, been safely ensconced in Larry Gagosian’s place since at least 2021, when it was loaned to the Philadelphia Museum’s half of the retrospective.

Phone It In, Vol. 002: An Art Writing Mixtape

It’s been a minute, but the latest edition of Phone It In: An Art Writing Mixtape is here. Thanks to all who called in to 34-SOUVENIR to share something you’ve read recently. As much as I could, I linked and namechecked people below.

It’s kind of wild how these end up reflecting a moment, even when they pull sources from across decades:

John Cage Doesn’t Do Windows

a slightly wrinkled, cream colored t-shirt with a greytone image of a view across a low table out a large window toward deck and railing, beyond which is a foggy landscape with spruce trees close to the deck, from a 1993 john cage exhibition at moca in los angeles — Rolywholyover: A Circus, MOCA, 1993 t-shirt, recto

For many years I couldn’t find this quote from John Cage anywhere; it only existed on the t-shirt I bought from Rolywholyover: A Circus, a 1993 show I saw in all its venues, and which continues to live in my head. When it was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1995, there was a period when I went to see it every day.

the back of a cream t-shirt for rolywholyover a circus, a 1993 john cage exhibition at moca los angeles, with a quote from cage printed in grey: indians long ago knew that Music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away

Anyway, the quote is, “Indians long ago knew that Music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn’t stop when one turned away.”

As I remembered it, Cage’s point was that Music was like Nature, and extended beyond the frame of the window, the device which defined a landscape. But reading it now/again, I see that it’s not the window he was talking about, but the looking, or rather, the turning away. That Music exists independent of our experience of it.

With the exact text, it’s easy enough to turn up the source of Cage’s quote, which was a lecture in Boston, delivered on December 8, 1965, and recorded by WGBH. It’s archived as part of a show called, Pantechnicon, but Cage said his lecture was titled, “Rhythm, &c.,” and that he’d created it for a six-volume series of texts collected by György Kepes called, Vision + Value. [Alice Rawsthorn’s account of the architecture-heavy Vision + Value gives better context than Cage does for why Le Corbusier is so relevant.]

Cage’s buildup to this quote is a critique of the structures—musical and otherwise—we inherited, adopted, moved into without thinking, like furnished apartments:

The thing that was irrelevant to the structures we formerly made—and this was what kept us breathing—was what took place within them. Their emptiness we took for what it was: a place where anything could happen. That was one of the reasons we were able when circumstances became inviting changes in consciousness etc. to go outside where breathing is child’s play. No walls not even the glass ones which though we could see through them killed the birds while they were flying.

Even in the case of object, the boundaries are not clear. I see through what you made. If, that is, the reflections don’t send me back where I am.

I’m going to need to sit with this a bit, and it probably won’t be right now.

Pantechnicon: John Cage, 1966 [americanarchive.org]

Sculptures For Being In Public

Art historian David J. Getsy has a new essay out, a long-brewing consideration of Scott Burton’s public sculpture practice in the context of the AIDS epidemic, and as a subtle, determined resistance to the silencing and erasure of people with AIDS. Everything was going down at once in the 1980s, and Getsy argues that Burton’s furniture-like public installations, readily overlooked, were an early example of an artist grappling with the communal and individual experience of AIDS.

What somehow caught me off guard was how at odds Burton’s public project was to the rest of the art world he was so enmeshed in, a world where the fearless artist’s place in public culture was being thrashed out in the battle over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc.

In 1985, while speaking from within “this minority culture that is avant-garde art,” Burton told Richard Francis that, though he supported Serra’s effort, he saw things differently: “I feel the world is now in such bad shape that the interior liberty of the artist is a pretty trivial area. Communal and social values are now more important. What office workers do in their lunch hour is more important than my pushing the limits of my self-expression.”

This difference is central to Getsy’s analysis: “Burton relinquished the recognizability of his role as artist and creator—a role that was so central to Serra’s project and the art world’s defense of it.

This position of passivity (however critically engaged) clashed with the masculinist presumptions of sculpture as a space-dominating occupation.”

“Appearing Asymptomatic: Scott Burton’s Public Art and the Knowledge of AIDS,” American Art 39, no. 3 (Fall 2025): 54–83 [via davidgetsy.com]

[later today update] Getsy’s October 2025 talk in Chicago about Burton’s sculpture incorporates parts of the essay. It was posted three weeks ago.

Previously, related: Scott Burton Estate Planning
Getsy on Burton’s performance art
Scott Burton Marble Armchair [made, ironically, from the same marble used on the redesigned, Tilted Arc-less Federal Plaza]

Rockefellers Who Bought Shaker Desks Also Bought

a gold framed portrait of an 18th century british loyalist in boston while he still had a full head of hair hangs above a brown shaker writing desk, on which sit two little silver sauce tureens with lids, a photo of a rockefeller farm published by christies — installation view of a Shaker desk; two George III sauce tureens which are at least stamped; and a portrait where the date, title, attribution, and depicted age of the sitter, who I think is Benedict Arnold’s lawyer, Ward Chipman, do not line up, but at least it all belonged to some Rockefellers

Maybe it’s because it’s an online sale in January. Maybe it’s the no reserve, low estimate, leftover furniture from the third guest room. But lot descriptions of American furniture at major auction houses used to overflow with material detail, construction analsys, and connoisseurial judgment behind the dating, attribution, and origin of an object.

But now, literally the only thing that matters about this “elder’s desk” Christie’s says is made in the “19th century,” “possibly” by a cabinetmaker, at an unidentified Shaker community, is not those shockingly lyrical, but also justifiably structural, curved leg braces, but that Mr & Mrs John D. Rockefeller 3d bought it, and their daughter is selling it.

the back of a reddish brown shaker writing desk of hickory and pine, we're told, is distinguished by the thin curved braces in a different wood and finish on either side of each very thin rear leg, which form a v, supporting the desk in ways the shakers never imagined? being sold by a rockefeller at christie's — what happened to the communion with God in that Shaker village that these curved brackets were added, and the slides for an entire second drawer were just tacked onto the legs like that? It feels like there is a whole story in this thing, and it is not being told

13-27 Jan 2026, Lot 842: A SHAKER PINE AND HICKORY ELDER’S TALL DESK, POSSIBLY BY THOMAS BISHOP, 19TH CENTURY, est. $US 5-10,000 [christies]
previously, related: Protect me from what I want [an Appalachian painted twig side table]

Levine X Soutine

a framed watercolor painting of a photo of a painting by chaim soutine of a pale white musician in a dark suit, against a dark background, all flattened to a single watercolored surface, sold at christie's in 2017 — Sherrie Levine, after Soutine (The Musician), 1984, watercolor on paper, 9 x 5 3/4 in. on 14 x 11 sheet, sold in 2017 at Christie’s

While speedrunning through Soutines at Christie’s the other day, this popped up, Sherrie Levine’s 1984 watercolor of a Soutine that belonged to Melva Bucksbaum.

Of course, it’s not a watercolor of a Soutine, but a watercolor of a reproduction of a Soutine, yet another flattening step removed from the intense painterly construction of Soutine’s portrait.

The Aspen Museum had a whole show of early Sherrie Levine this past summer, and it’s worth remembering that rephotographing reproductions à la After Walker Evans was just one of Levine’s techniques for exploring the reproduction and circulation of images. Others included buying and framing posters of paintings; framed plates from art books; drew photos of drawings; and painted photos of paintings.

Back in the day, these watercolors were discussed in terms of their declarative absence of the original’s structure and painterly action, and as a thin, even surface on a thick paper ground. But they’re paintings of photos, so whatever flattening is there counts as documentation.

Anyway, I’m not finding a ton of stuff about Levine’s watercolors, nor of her exploration of Soutine. What I do see, though, makes me wonder why Bucksbaum, of all people, matted this picture this way, when it feels like it should be floated on its sheet.

Herbert’s Richter Five Stages of Painting

a horizon line, where the sky meets the ground, or in this case the beach, is a low flat bridge. the sky seems too blue for daylight, perhaps it is star-flecked, so a twilight moment where the light is rapidly disappearing along the bottom. the sea and beach are blurry, indistinct from each other, but a single field that seems to capture or reflect much of the color of the fading light, though the bottom edge of the image is darker than everything but the bridge and the land spit it connects to. unlike a real horizon, this one runs at a slight angle, the left side of the picture slightly lower, and taken all together, it means it's a basic snapshot of a basic landscape, maybe the exposure was so long it smoothed the motion of the sea, now turned into a sublime painting by gerhard richter. — Gerhard Richter, Brǔcke (am Meer), CR-202, 1969, 93 x 98 cm, collection: Neues Museum, Nuremberg, image via gerhard-richter.com

Martin Herbert writing on Gerhard Richter for Apollo

For three decades, he could increasingly do anything, while coolly suggesting that perhaps none of it mattered in the grand scheme of things, even as his paintings also persistently whispered that maybe it did. Like so much great art, his can be endlessly revisited due to its fathoms-deep ambiguity. Look at an earlyish, unassuming canvas like Bridge (at the Seaside) (1969): a spit of land and outstretching bridge forming a horizon line under a delicately blueing, star-dotted evening sky, nobody around, the lower half fuzzily ambiguous: maybe it’s water, maybe beach, maybe half of each. Here is a casual, banal, snapshot-style update of the German landscape tradition, a knowingly minor thing. Yet it’s also somehow hushed and beautiful, almost tender—everything and nothing swirling together for you to tease apart or accept, finally, as indivisible.

I had wanted to avoid exhausted, but maybe I need to get to the Fondation Louis Vuitton Richter retrospective after all, for the acceptance of indivisibility

Gerhard Richter at Full Scale [apollo-magazine]

Chaïm Soutine Little Guy

chaim soutine painted this small white child in pale blue against a slightly darker blue background on a small canvas in 1934 — Chaïm Soutine, le Petit Garçon, 1934, oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 14 7/8 in., sold at Christie’s in 2016

Chaïm Soutine was one of the first artists I found instead of being taught, and I am still enthralled by the intense, uphoved world of his paintings. [His real life, kind of a bummer, tbqh.]

Anyway, after @pg5-ish reblogged Soutine’s Two Children on a Tree Trunk (1942-3) into my tumblr dashboard this morning, I went looking for it, and found instead this great little painting of an unsettled little guy, which sold at Christie’s in 2016.

Nan Goldin’s Press Conference

a curly red haired middle aged white lady in a black suit sits, tense, in a black directors chair, as white arms holding recorders and microphones enter the image from the left, and a figure in a black t-shirt with perhaps a keffiyeh around her waiste walks behind in the white floored, black box space of the neue nationalgalerie in berlin. nan goldin's press conference is a 2025 painting by sam mckinniss of a november 2024 opening event of the artist's retrospective where she spoke out against israeli genocide in palestine. this painting was published by equator dot org in december 2025 — Sam McKinniss, Nan Goldin’s Press Conference, 2025, published alongside David Velasco’s essay, “How Gaza Broke The Art World,” in Equator

As I read I found myself flagging more and more paragraphs to quote here from David Velasco’s Equator essay, “How Gaza Broke The Art World.” The whole surreally infuriating scene with Klaus at the opening of Nan Goldin’s retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie? The whole Artforum debacle? The fracture of our collective illusions about the art world? Then Sam McKinniss’s Nan Goldin’s Press Conference (2025) scrolled by, and now I can say just go read the whole thing.