Series

If you arrive before opening time, along with the Northern EU tourists and other punctual heirs, Greater New York 2005 greets you as a wall of names behind a tall gate. The 163 identities are arranged, not surprisingly, in what Borges called alphabetical disorder, revealing no hierarchy except that of the first letters of their last names, which makes it easy to find the people you know, or just to marvel at the implications. Vladimir Nabokov and Georges Perec, for example, seem to have pieced together A through B with help from the King James Bible. Who else, and I mean besides God, could have come up with: Derrick Adams, Richard Aldrich, Kamrooz Aram, Cory Arcangel, Hope Atherton, Nina Lola Bachhuber, Huma Bhabha, Gil Blank, and Bozidar Brazda.

But the press packet reveals that the intelligent designers were actually a team of about thirty curators from PS1 and MOMA (which have now become one mega arts institution), including Alanna Heiss, who, we are informed, has curated over 2,000 exhibitions—a magnitude I thought exclusively the domain of outsider artists and Pablo Picasso. Then 2,000 pops up again as the staggering tally of artists who responded to the open call for entries. If the official material fails to mention how many of those artists failed to make it into the final selection, we feel the curators’ pain—umpteen thousand unacceptable slides aren’t good publicity for anyone. Ultimately, the participants in the show came almost exclusively from the 350 applicants whose prestigious graduate schools or galleries recommended them. As those institutions work in closer and closer concert, it’s particularly hard to tell whom to praise or blame—except, as usual, the art world.

Undaunted and even inspired by the sheer incomprehensibility of something so very comprehensive, n+1 brings you “Art Week: Five days, five critics, numberless implications.” Andy Fitch starts us off.