In our attempts to decode new art, we often skip over a fundamental process that helps make art function: false perceptions. Artists often make things that deceive. The metaphysical disconnect between the object that we are looking at and the intellectual experience is the subject of Otherworldly at the Museum of Art & Design, which focuses on dioramas, models, snow globes, and other illusionary sculptures[.....]

An athletic international globe-trotter, Shaun Gladwell‘s first solo show in the US is Matrix 162 at the Wadsworth Atheneum. The exhibition is of five videos (2005 through 2010) and one still image from a video. It ends up reading as a sort of mini-retrospective. It brings together work from his early preoccupation with extreme sports and urban motion through his reflection on the Mad Max[.....]

A storehouse like no other, a museum summons objects and concerns from both past and present. The unfortunate reality is that, once collected, it doesn’t matter if the objects are important or trivial. Once bought or donated, the objects are catalogued and placed in the storehouse, rarely seeing the light of day. It’s a sad, lonely life for most of the museum’s collection. The only[.....]

Early video is so lovable. Hidden in the low-contrast images and lost political references are rebellious experiments to find a way to express the vibrant importance of the moment. The more than 40 videos of Record > Again! at the Goethe Institute are a time capsule that hold an insight into some of the struggles and hopes of the German artists who made them. These[.....]

Hidden within the hard facts are things too complicated and involved to be considered with too much precision. Economists and scientists choose what to measure when running their reports with good reason: if they eliminate the extraneous data than the utility of their predictive models increase. This process hides what Gabriel Kuri calls “soft information in hard facts.” His sculptures are attempts to reclaim that[.....]

This spring, the Manifest.AR collective is presenting new and established augmented reality (AR) artworks at the ICA during the 2011 Boston Cyberarts festival. Approximately 16 artists will present their incorporeal digital art in and around the ICA. Some will be site-specific works that respond to the architecture of the museum and some will aim to juxtapose their work against the existing physical exhibitions in the[.....]

I’m reluctant to quote from Emerson’s Quotation and Originality, but it really does add to a conversation about the Stan VanDerBeek exhibition at MIT. While Emerson is obsessed with verbal communication and upholding the cannon as a garden that we can “honestly” borrowed from, The Culture Intercom actively fights the idea that “all minds quote” and “the originals are not original.” VanDerBeek’s career was filled[.....]