ABSTRACT: THE ART WORLD review of “Ghosts in the Machine,” at the New Museum. “Ghosts in the Machine” is a big, busy, historical show of wonky art, rummaging in old romances with the technological sublime. There are hundreds of works, ranging from early-twentieth-century drawings by asylum inmates who felt invaded by machinery to relics of utopian movements that flared and faded in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. “Ghosts” bypasses canonical modernism, mostly ignoring the familiar machine-inspired stylings of Futurists, Dadaists, Russian Constructivists, and adherents of the Bauhaus. The curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, concentrate on things that were true to their moments but barely outlasted them, if at all. The result is a field of sputtering dreams.
“Ghosts in the Machine” at the New Museum : The New Yorker This review is required reading for students of new and emerging media art forms. Unfortunately it is behind a walled garden. Find a friend or library with a New Yorker subscription. Peter Schjeldahl is in fine form with this essay.