Zoom and Crop
Experts agree on Ayoung Kim. Plus bad nostalgia and a rare sparkly Nebbiolo.
While I’m looking forward to seeing it, I can’t offer an opinion on Ayoung Kim’s much-praised work; those in New York will soon have a chance to form their own views at PS1 as well as at Performa. The buzz surrounding Kim’s multimedia oeuvre—she won the 2025 LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Award, and her NYC takeover is fresh on the heels of a show at Hamburger Bahnhof, and last fall a show in Gwangju—clearly derives from the general yearning for someone to create art that explains to our old meat selves our new extended, cybernetic, cyborgian ones, or the other way around, or both.
Another thing I can say for certain is that Kim has issued a killer PR still. Beyond the crops on the covers of the two competing legacy art mags shown above, the image also appeared in full this year in Art Review and Ocula. It looks like nothing so much as a painting heisted from the Syd Mead show in NYC this spring. But in fact it’s not a painting at all, nor a still from one of Kim’s acclaimed videos. Rather, it’s an installation view of a sculptural tableau at the Bahnhof, part of the Delivery Dancer body of work that will be making its US debut this week.
This photo’s siren call to someone attempting to compress a multifarious artwork into a single image, which is the job of graphic designers as well as our friends in PR, lies in its success in conveying how the digital seems to be absorbing the material world. Check out the starbursts and reflections on the helmets: impossibly crisp, no doubt enhanced. They’re kind of an inverse punctum, the point where the real’s absence proclaims itself. We seek such moments regularly now in our attempts to tell photos from AI.
The still’s background flattens out perfectly from the photographer’s POV to seamlessly integrate with the mannequins up front into a single surface. Only as your eye descends, when objects appear against the blue carpeting—the gloves, the smallest flecks of glass, the seam created where the backdrop stops before it hits the ground—do you get citations of dusty reality, though you have to take a careful look to find them, particularly on the magazine covers.
The pixelated spiral on the face shields, meanwhile, provides an irresistible metaphor. Our precious notion of personal infinitude suggested by the whorl—we contain universes—merges with technology to expand human potential. At the same time, given the spiral’s other connotations, it threatens to suck us into a maelstrom or wreck us like a Jupiterian hurricane. In itself, it’s a promising teaser for Kim’s show.
You can grasp the gap between this gorgeously staged still and what you would have encountered in the gallery thanks to the Associated Press, who offer a far less polished vision of Ghost Dancers B via videography that hasn’t advanced beyond the quality of local TV news. In 2025, that turns out to be a very useful thing.
In the video, you can see how the room itself was in fact much more dimly lit than the floodlit photo, and what a peculiar angle the photographer took to make the assemblage look flawless. That grid of red and green lights is revealed to be the back of a server bank or video wall glimpsed through an aperture in the backdrop. All of this reflection on lighting and presentation puts me in mind of an old essay, Michael Sanchez’s ahead-of-the-curve piece in Artforum about the effects of widespread smartphone use, memetic circulation, and other mediations on contemporary art and its photography.
In the end, the real hero of this tale is the still’s creator, Jacopo LaForgia. Hire this man to document your next exhibition, or at least poach his retoucher. LaForgia has an impressive resume, having done lots of documentary/editorial photography around the world—Calabrian wildfires, fighting in Kashmir—but he can also create slick shots of major art installations, which requires a very different skill set indeed. LaForgia’s dateability is confirmed by the hunky Mediterranean visage glimpsed on his About page, dimmed only by the potential dealbreaker that he wrote with a master’s thesis on Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
Can We Not
Imperial decline is better captured by naive nostalgia for ’00s garbage than by the garbage itself. This press release qua self-parody attempting to habilitate Snow’s vomit-limned oeuvre, particularly the Polaroids hawked here, emerges from a desire to recoup nihilism for the good guys, a yearning for the days when it was chic rather than Pepe-fied. Also I’m pretty sure he would have clocked you if you called him a bon vivant.
Wine
G. D. Vajra Claré J. C. 2024. Nebbiolo isn’t a grape I get, really. Of course my means rarely reaches Barolo and Barbaresco price points, which could account for my general indifference. But the Spigot wine section will always seek to bring you bargains, dear reader, and such is this rare Nebbiolo that offers something unique but won’t break the bank.
Claré J. C. (which had been dubbed claret until the French got proprietary about the term) is young, loping, and relatively cheap. It comes from the Langhe, just like its fancy cousins, but is handled much differently. No oak, very brief aging, and thus much less tannin. If this modish approach offends you traditionalists, well, surprise. “The winemaking protocol follows the 1606 writings of G. B. Croce, jeweler of the House of Savoia,” says the company’s product sheet. “The wine is bottled soon after the fermentation so as to retain a gentle off-dry finish and a lovely energy.”
Unfortunately I have been unable to find Croce’s “On the Excellence and Diversity of Wines That Are Made in the Mountains of Turin,” but apparently he knew what he was talking about, because Claré J. C. is delicious.[1] It’s a tad brownish, as Nebbiolo can be, and offers no more for the nose than a single smoky tendril. The flavor, by contrast, is zealous and bright, with a well-balanced sweetness. The light weight and strands of carbonation makes it feel almost like a cola in your mouth until a little tannin taps the airbrakes and the wine glides to earth. Claré J. C. is decidedly fruity—maybe the proper soda comp is not cola but cherry Coke—but when I drank it with baked chicken breasts and roasted broccoli (boring, yes, but don’t judge), the honeyed edge came off. More tannins kick in after twenty minutes or so, too, which gives the wine just a little more grip on whatever you’re eating.
Zohraniana
Wallow in victory, leftists, with this video of our cutie-pie mayor-elect answering questions penned by of my favorite comedians, Maria Bamford—who happens to be the subject of an exhibition of works by her husband, the painter Scott Marvel Cassidy, currently on view at La Loma Projects in Los Angeles. Zohran thinks artists should toughen up and gets claustrophobic on the subway. He really is one of us :)
[1] If you’re curious about this mysterious 17th-century royal jeweler, Wine Spectator ran an informative-for-the-layperson-like-myself article on Claré J. C. that interviews a Vajra family scion, who leads production a range of Barolos and other wines. Croce is discussed, and Thomas Jefferson makes an unexpected cameo, but the specifics of the methodology remain a little vague. Of course if they were specific, I wouldn’t understand them anyway.