What happens when a bad-faith agenda exploits art with good intentions? Something like the Shed’s side-by-side installations by Tony Cokes and Oscar Murillo. (A third segment of the show features screenings of a short film by Yanina Valdivieso and Vanessa Bergonzol about a public artwork in Bogotá, Columbia commemorating victims of that country’s civil war.) Using video (and, in Murillo's case, painting), the two take aim at neoliberalism’s ills—though Cokes is a decent artist while Murillo is a terrible one. And while it’s easy to skip Murillo’s part of the show, there’s no avoiding the exhibition’s Hudson Yards context. Besides being a redoubt for the rich, Hudson Yards is a nexus for the kind of official culture funded by the 1 percent to deflect attention from its vast influence. Exhibit A is Stephen M. Ross, Hudson Yards developer, Shed board member and major Trump financier.
Despite this, Cokes, a longtime practitioner of institutional critique, blasts video-projected messages that include one citing the art world’s complicity in gentrification (duh). Given what’s outside the gallery, are we supposed to take this as irony, or is Cokes simply being tone-deaf? Murillo brands himself as a critic of globalism, but you’d hardly know it from his crappy, abstract canvases or from his video lampooning Times Square tourists, who become targets of punching down when performers follow them around in grotesque, over-the-head masks.
With boycotts of Ross’s other investments (SoulCycle, Equinox), and protests leading to the removal of a Whitney Museum of Art trustee whose company sells tear gas, it’s clear that people are tiring of plutocratic bullshit. Which begs the question: Can artists speak truth to power when the powerful foot the bill?