August 18, 2008

A Sea Change


For the August 4, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl wrote about "After Nature", a group show currently at the New Museum (July 17—September 21), that I just saw in New York. Curator Massimiliano Gioni's exhibition, "After Nature", referencing Werner Herzog's Lessons in Darkness (1992), Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic The Road (2006) and W.G. Sebald's book-length poem After Nature, reveals, according to Schjeldahl, "a shift of emphasis, from surface to depth, and a shift of mood, from mania to melancholy, shrugging off the allures of the money-hypnotized market and the spectacle-bedizened biennials circuit. (In fact the underappreciated Whitney Biennial hinted at the mutation.) It's fashion auditioning as a sea change."