OMG The Glassell show is SOOOOOOO Boring

Talking Popcorn, Nina Katchadourianwas

Douglas Britt just gave y'all a gift. He shined the shows (did I mean shoes?) of the MFAH with a ham-handed review of the recent Equivalence: Acts of Translation in Contemporary Art on the day that it closed. If you hadn't heard about it, its just as well. It was totally not cool.

Britt quotes the catalog describing the show's thematic thread; "[Equivalence] explores how visual artists, like linguists, go about 'starting with one thing and translating it into something else,'" which just sounds like a pale remnant of Jasper Johns' famous quote "Take an object, do something to it. Do something else to it." Truly, the artists exhibited here are able to take intriguing narrative, nostalgia and art history and translate it into boring.

Meltdown (After Monet:4), Sherrie Levine

Considering that every artist that ever did anything has taken something and done something to it, Britt's point that "[t]here are probably enough artists working in similar veins to fill a show" bashes readers' skulls in with its alacrity to honor the curator of Equivalence, Jennifer King.

With bloody bits of bone and smeared gray matter everywhere in the white-walled room, there is no need to explain why this show is boring, it just looks uninteresting. I thought the popcorn popper that translates "pops" into words was cool at first, but then the depressing reality of trying to get coherent inspiration from random elements convinced me that Nina Katchadourianwas just a hopeless romantic, tied up in knots over the end of history, the end of art, the end of the artworld, and the end of beauty.

The current status quo for artists graduating from prestigious universities is to wrap a world of nothingness around their art objects, projecting strength through snake oil and slight-of-hand. The boobs who buy it are fit to be shorn of their dollar bills, buying the favor of a dinner guest or more than willing Shylock victim more than the object itself. While provenance has always been the base of art history, and this show lends institutional weight to the work included, the sheer BOOOORINGness of it all is enough for one to question the entire system- like when a call in a basketball game goes the wrong way and you just shut off the TV. Equivalence is blatantly, patently offensive in its inability to connect with an audience who has not read specifically about the artists.

I mean, come on, yo.