DIGEST 121: Like Art
At Auction June 10-16, 2026
I’ve been reading Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts and I just finished her essay on Ingrid Sischy, written in 1986 while Sischy was EIC of Artforum (she’d been appointed at 27 and, as she confesses to Malcolm, had never actually read the magazine before). In it, Rene Ricard, who is a distinctly bitchy voice traces out the use of a smudgy charcoal line from “de Kooning, to Rivera, Serra, and in its ultimate decadence to Susan Rothenberg.” He notes, “Judy Rifka told me that when she was in art school all her teachers drew that way. That was the way you were taught, and no matter how lousy the drawing was, it always looked pretty good, like ‘art.’” The idea of “looking like art” is cutting; I have a friend (a well-established artist) who once described an acquaintance as making “work that looks like art” and I cannot see his work in any other way now—an observantly chic moodboard of cribbed stylistic choices, made knowing full well that the right white box gallery will be just the right prosthesis to pass it off as the real deal.
Malcolm uses the astute observation as a setup to a real knockout punch: “The conventional bohemianism that Ricard embodies may be going the way of the art line he so tellingly describes.” Malcolm’s patience has worn thin; Ricard is made to offer up a perfect critique of his own pose, devastating because over and above his writing, it is his person he’s offered up for Malcolm’s appraisal. The grating reactionary is revealed as a “conventional bohemian” and worse, a passé one.
I had some of this in mind when I went to see the new New Museum. The museum is hung with one enormous show New Humans, Memories of the Future. It is simply too large to review here, but I would recommend seeing it. Having worked my way down from the top floor of real gallery space (not including the crown of the new OMA addition which houses New Inc.—which like…clap if you have any idea what that this), by the time I hit the fascism room I was ready for a nap. The work of sorting out the real deal from the fake shit, I leave to you. In the real deal column: I had not seen Pierre Huyghe’s 2014 Untitled (Human Mask)—it is a video of a monkey wearing a human mask in a world where humans are gone. The video offers that most tantalizing of fantasies—to see what the world is like when our backs our turned, which is to say, to see by way of subtraction what it is that we are. The video is worth going to the museum for.
OK, I just lost at auction and I’m bummed. Drop a like on this post to make me feel better. And shoutout to the Knicks—it sucks to lose. No paywall this week because we are all in grief in our own particular ways.
To the listings!
Piene (1928-2014) has been in the Arcades before. German, worked in the US, founded Group ZERO (radical art movement founded after WWII to refound art). I like this whole catalog, check it out.
Émile Gallé (1846–1904) founder of the Nancy school (Nancy, France—not like Kerrigan). Father of Art Nouveau. I lack the expertise to authenticate this but I love the colors.
Larry Bell (b.1939) OG postminimalist. I like his flat works better than his sculptures. Illusionism as a problem kind of beefs up the conceptual content to me.
Mason (1927-2019), ceramicist. You might know his big more geometric work. This is cool, early and raw. Great colors.
Glöckner, German, (1889-1987), constructivist. Kind of crazy auction—the estate is selling off a bunch of work, all of which comes with a certificate showing it in the catalogue raisonné. There is more typical work in the auction but I like this—a mind at work.
From the circle of Jusepe De Ribera (1591-1652). I really don’t know anything about that but I like the painting.
Nakajima Raisho (1796-1871); these are quite large, depicting the sun and moon. Soooo chic. I can see these on opposite walls, or adjoining rooms.
I always love a Catalog Projects catalog. In NY. I think it’s just Avi now. He’s got a great eye.
I don’t exactly know what purpose these would serve for me but I just know they’d come in handy. Like when I take my child servants and have them face a corner as they eat their gruel in silence. Not that, but you see where I’m going.
Well yes.
May the hammer fall ever in your favor.