Charissa N. Terranova is a freelance critic and curator. She is the author of Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (University of Texas Press, January 2014).
Irony has been the standard currency of avant-garde art for so long now—50 years or even a century depending on how one looks at it—that it is simply grammatical.
There was no public vernissage where art-fanboys might tip hats to a curator and the new artist on the scene, Dubya, while getting tipsy from champagne.
According to the proverbial mission statement, the function of a given city’s contemporary art space is to exhibit the work of young, emerging artists from the area, and to proffer artistic experimentation therein. Let us consider this to be the face of things.
The last time anyone thought about masculine stereotypes in the art world was when, inspired by the obtuse adjacencies of Time-Life magazine cut-outs on the floor, Richard Prince re-photographed pictures of male models in the late 1970s.
México Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990 is a tour de force of ambiguity. As a show with work by 23 artists connected to Mexico it runs the risk of being a politically-correct art-ghetto based on geographical stereotypes.
