Reviews In Brief
Amsterdam

“The End of Sitting”
Looiersgracht 60 // November 22, 2014–December 7, 2014
Sitting is the new smoking, some say, and working while standing is a big fad. This new space for art and science is filled with a beautiful, futuristic, and giant installation (25 meters long and at some points 3 meters high) that people sit in/at/on and work. So instead of perfecting the standing desk, Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances (raaaf) and visual artist Barbara Visser create an experimental office where they empirically investigate new ways of working and moving.

“Balconism”
MoMart // November 28, 2014–January 17, 2015
Remember Julian Assange’s speech on the Ecuadorian Embassy of London’s balcony? That platform inspired Constant Dullaart’s Balconism movement, in which the balcony figures as public and private space, online and offline. This strong, political show centers around the commodification of images and audiences in the digital age: Ola Lanko’s work reduces images to a representative sample, Thomas Kuijpers’s drawings reveal hidden messages in world leaders’ handshakes, and Dullaart bought millions of Instagram-followers and divided this social capital among 30 art-world professionals, in an attempt to equalize them.

“Bad Thoughts”
Stedelijk Museum // July 20, 2014–January 11, 2015
In the era of flipping and profits, this show of about 200 works from the Martijn and Jeannette Sanders collection romanticizes the story of collecting—friendships with artists (visits to Gilbert & George's garden), fresh-out-of-art school discoveries (their first Cindy Sherman cost $400 in 1981), never sell your works ('they are like our diary') and unexpected encounters (Keith Haring's nightly drawings on snowy cars). But it is the artistic narrative that prevails, with subtle, witty pieces by Douglas Huebler, Bill Beckley and Robert Cumming and impressive works by Anselm Kiefer and David Claerbout.

Published in Modern Painters #March 2015