#to quote the year 2014: its all ogre now

[gumptin]

my last words... wtfock s3e10 review

- is that,,,, is that FORTNITE?

- as my 17 year old brother says “that was a rage quit”

- i bet sander is gonna cope with this through his art while robbe copes with it THROUGH FORTNITE because (say it with me one last time) ROBBE HATES THE ARTS!

- senne is my favorite himbo. he just be handsome and love girlfriend and that’s his whole character but I Respect Him So Much

- FACE TO FACE!!

- milan looks like that “weirdo” guy from riverdale

- if zoe and senne break up i am going to astral project into whatever plane fiction exists on and scream at them

- what if this phone call was just senne calling robbe from the other room

- HIS MOTHER??? IS COMING??? HOME??

- okay not to out myself but i’ve been to an inpatient mental hospital before and they Do Not just let people walk down the halls like that

- *beyonce meme* BRITT?!

- i LOVE the very clearly staged drawing of robbe with all the pencil shavings on it... and the paper is way smaller than the sketchbook it is on and THE SCISSORS WHICH ARE 20000% NEVER ALLOWED IN A MENTAL HOSPITAL and now that i think about it NEITHER ARE PENCIL SHARPENERS

-“i’ll do the same” is britt’s One Sentence Character Development. this technique was also seen with aaron in the cafe scene.

- this room looks very staged i’m sorry

- how long do exams last in belgium why are they still in school?

- jens is like... tall

- “you should’ve seen him there all wrapped up in...” TIN FOIL! LIKE A HOT DOG!

- “i can’t protect you against the fallout” okay john green

- au where everything is the same but robbe naruto runs down the hall like an anime club kid

- why are there just cans all over the floor of that room

- i like the warm filter they used on the clips... Very Pleasing To Mine Eye

- if sander starts crying i’m peacing our for the night i don’t want to feel emotion

- oh my that’s so... como se dice.... Tender

- MINUTE BY MINUTE?!

- even in a very emotionally compromising situation sander gotta use A Little Tongue

- god my heart clenched this is unacceptable

- i wish they had used the original version of You’re The One That I Want... Olivia Newton John BELONGS in skam

- omg britt got character development through text QUEEN

- robbe kinda fit tho ngl

- the Tenderness 🤢🤢

- oh god ohhhhhh goddddddd

- i feel like an unhinged white woman in an arthouse film wailing at the loss of her husband... but it’s just over zoe and senne breaking up

- the actress who plays zoe honestly serving up the best performance of 2019

- omg is moyo going to get One Sentence Character Development too?????

- NO I DONT KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN SAY IT YOU COWARD

- jens, a skater boy with an earring, really just said zendaya isn’t a ten... wtfock writers on some bullshit i tell you what

-so in this hypothetical deserted island robbe has to fuck to survive or...?

- bruh was that a green screen or is there really a part of that city where you can just walk above it bc if so that’s cool as hell

- he literally stared into it for a solid three seconds before spraying that perfume in his eyes

- he got those perfume samples in his hand like a very lame version of wolverine who gives his opponents paper cuts

- BABY! NOOR!!

- when he said sorry... i felt that

- what if noor hadn’t been working this shift

- robbe ONLY dates people who wear combat boots

- FAMILY GAME NIGHT

- not to sound like everyone else on here but That Was Soft

- aaron: hey little mama lemme whisper in your ear

- a 17 year old getting alcohol for christmas... america could NEVER

- it’s a box??? robbe got a box???

- bro you know the vibes when your ex gf and current bf become friends

- NOTHING i write in these reviews is even HALF as jarringly funny as what luca said about bathbombs... i give up

- teenage boys who film everything are the bane of my existence

- COOL PUSSY????????????? cool pussy.... he said, and i quote, “cool pussy”. the writers of this show wrote that down and then he said it. in the show. on television.

- YASMINA THERE SHE IS

- oh for a second i thought robbe was gonna text sander from across the room

- “TONIGHT”

- sander said: minute by minute? more like miNUTe by miNUTe

- awwwwwwwww :’)

- they just yeeted me, the viewer, into the sky.

okay it’s been real y’all... a lot more people ended up liking these than i expected so thanks for reading and sending me asks (and sorry i don’t answer them all... y’all are welcome to dm me if you really wanna talk about this show lol). i might end up doing this again for skam españa who knows????

#to quote the year 2014: its all ogre now #lexi watches wtf #wtfock

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Life After Art: William Powhida’s Futures Market

Installation view of William Powhida’s “After the Contemporary” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (all images via williampowhida.com)

RIDGEFIELD, Connecticut — I can tell you the moment when, in mid-March 2016, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign stopped being funny, and I can tell you the moment when, after spending more than two hours with the show, William Powhida: After the Contemporary stopped being funny.

It was when I reached the placard at the warren-like installation’s dead end, and read the following passage:

The permanent relocation of both Art Basel’s Miami Beach edition and the general population of Miami Beach following the devastating flooding of Hurricane Hillary in 2023 served to wind down the Contemporary period. Art Basel ushered in the Alt-Contemporary with the announcement of its ambitious plans for a private, Ultra-only fair in Thieland, a micronation established by legendary ArtsTech guru Peter Thiel in 2025.

I should hit pause for a moment and explain that Powhida’s exhibition, which takes up half of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s second floor, is a meta-besotted extravaganza of image and text, mostly text, purporting to take place in the year 2050.

Installation view of William Powhida’s “After the Contemporary” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art

Filled with futuristic arcana and art world in-jokes (including one aimed at the editor-in-chief of this publication), it takes the form of a survey tracing a quarter-century of contemporary art history, using Powhida’s benighted career arc and the rise of Grevsky™ — the corporate art-generating entity he co-founded with the collector Seth Stolbun in 2016 — as its touchstones.

To unpack the above-quoted text: the “Contemporary period” is a time more or less synonymous with Modernism, in which artists maintained their ”historic position as avant-garde, iconoclastic figures who rejected the status quo and the dominant values of society.”

These values, however, had been “slowly compromised by the increasing professionalization of the visual arts after World War II,” which tempted artists with “the possibility of joining the middle class through sales and teaching.” (All quotations are from the exhibition’s placards.)

By 2050, however, the Contemporary has been replaced by the “Alt-Contemporary” (hence the exhibition-within-the-exhibition’s title, After the Contemporary: Contemporary Art 2000-2025) — an era forecast by The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, a show that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in December 2014.

The Forever Now was a turning point, codifying a cultural paradigm in which “artists were no longer bound by time or innovation and could borrow from any period of art to produce paintings” — a “winnowing of style” from the personal and political to the corporate and homogenous, which was viewed not as “an aberration or error of judgment” but “a triumph of the erudite sensibility of the Ultra collector, whose tastes and desire for apolitical content had already begun to directly influence the production of culture.”

Eventually, the class of super-rich patrons (known as Hereditary Ultra High Net Worth Collectors, or Ultras — which is also a term used by the speculative fiction writer Alastair Reynolds to designate “a post-human race of technologically advanced immortals”) began to demand “the luxury of art” while rejecting “the burden of supporting artists.”

This is the niche that Grevsky™, the corporation formed by Powhida and Stolbun, sought to fill by ordering works from anonymous artist subcontractors and marketing them solely under the Grevsky brand, which ultimately absorbed Powhida’s creative rights as well, triggering a lawsuit, near-bankruptcy, divorce, and exile in a borrowed shack in Costa Rica, where he spends his golden years painting pathetic pictures of clowns and donkeys.

Installation view of William Powhida’s “After the Contemporary” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art

This synopsis barely skims the surface of a multilayered, impudent, lacerating exhibition that pricks pretense and self-delusion on every level, from mega-rich collectors fancying themselves pillars of civilization to politically committed artists rationalizing their aspirations to the high-end gallery system. (Subplots include the oligarchical “Great Restoration of a natural social order that did not include a middle class”; the suppression of social justice movements; efforts at worldwide depopulation; extreme climate events; the defunding of the NEA; the 2024 merger of Gagosian and Zwirner; and the development of derivative algorithms to perpetuate the careers of deceased art stars.)

Powhida has been alternately called a conceptual artist and a political artist, and here he demonstrates that he is both and, it could be argued, neither. This is an exceedingly text-heavy show, to the point of self-parody, with nine eight-by-four-foot panels of sheetrock covered with narration and, in one instance, cultural and economic timelines. There are also nine pages of a Grevsky™ artist’s contract on display, and various crumpled pages apparently cut from future issues of Artforum (aka “Twenty Five Years of Impenetrable Discourse,” the title of a 2017 sculpture featuring magazines stacked floor-to-ceiling), including a wholly credible obituary of Jeff Koons (who died in 2025, according to the information on hand, in a self-driving Uber accident, an event that spurred the development of algorithmic editions for posthumously generated artworks).

And yet, the texts on the sheetrock are hand-stenciled in pencil — with full justification, no less — which defines the exhibition as a work of immense physical labor. And up and down the edges of the panels are dozens of snarky, subversive, and hilarious marginal notes, written in red and all caps, that systematically undercut the more straightforward narration of the pencil text.

And so, what, formally, is going on here? Powhida possesses some of the best drawing chops of anyone working today, yet he seems to be deliberately suppressing the visual. (The only place where his skills are fully manifested is in the small “retrospective” in the exhibition’s final room, where the introductory wall text confides, “The artist’s work remains significantly undervalued in the secondary market and would make an excellent addition to any collection.”)

Installation view of William Powhida’s “After the Contemporary” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art

The exhibition’s dearth of imagery is compounded and contradicted by the intense, protracted labor that went into the stenciling, which, paradoxically, also delivers a potent materiality and an old-fashioned sense of touch. These placards and charts, with their bravura precision, red highlights, and subtle, silvery textures are a hundred times more alive than the blindingly boring generic works on display in the faux Grevsky™ art fair booth in the middle of the exhibition.

The booth is key to the exhibition’s refusal to distinguish between parody and reality — its collection of paintings, ceramics, and fabrics — dominated by a giant color photograph of the Trump Taj Mahal and presided over by a video simulacra of a bored gallerista — are indistinguishable from bona fide Art Basel Miami Beach tchotchkes. If this is life after art — in which the work of “iconoclastic figures who rejected the status quo and the dominant values of society” has given way to “a triumph of the […] tastes and desire for apolitical content” — then isn’t the iconoclasm of the relentless text panels the only legitimate response?

But the denial of art represented by the text panels is undermined, to my eye, by the thrum of the human activity that created them. Is this then a hint of resurrection stirring beneath the values of a collector class “who derived their wealth and status almost entirely from returns on pure and perfect capital accumulation,” as the exhibition’s introductory text tells us? Or is it the illusion of an optimist?

The maddening thing about Powhida is how closely he holds his cards to his chest. He nonchalantly presents his constructed persona, a narcissistic fraud named William Powhida (here played in a video interview by Amos Satterlee) as the author of his work, which routinely skewers the art establishment’s glitterati with assertions bordering on the libelous. His compulsion for playing fast and loose with the facts, however, always seems to be operating at the service of some higher, darker truth.

And he does so especially in After the Contemporary, which effortlessly harnesses his obsession with art world inside baseball to a righteous anger fired by political hypocrisy, exploitation, and opportunism. Here it is obvious that art, as an investment tool for “hereditary heirs […] primarily from established art-collecting families with their own private museums,” isn’t simply symbolic of the economy’s subjugation by the financial elite, but rather, in itself, an irrefutable engine of that subjugation.

Still, paradoxes abound, and the same art that is compromised, denied, and vilified throughout the exhibition retains the power of revelation. As I read the lines quoted above citing “Thieland, a micronation established by legendary ArtsTech guru Peter Thiel,” I suddenly recalled watching Donald Trump on television last March, whipping up his followers with his cock-of-the-walk strut and Mussolini chin-thrusts, sucking up their vitriol and spewing it back at them like some kind of fire-breathing ogre. Something, at that moment, seemed irretrievably broken.

A little more than a year later, the idea of a neo-feudal state dominated by an impregnable economic elite whose personal wealth exceeds that of the French Ancien Régime, or a micronation governed by a data-mining billionaire, suddenly seemed as implausible as the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

William Powhida: After the Contemporary continues at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Connecticut) through September 4.

The post Life After Art: William Powhida’s Futures Market appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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