The hot city summer is just around the corner, the Knicks are mercurial as ever, and labor union art handlers are still out of work. New Yorkers have reason to complain. An apt occasion to gripe about the Scrooge McDucks of the art world came and went: the first New York edition of Frieze. The fair also provided galleries with the salacious opportunity to show just how garish they can really be. However, with all of the social and political opposition to opulent displays of the ultra-wealthy, it should come as no surprise that many galleries did not take that route this May. But changes in the art world are bound to occur at moments like this: call it historical inevitability. Whatever the causal factors may be, several galleries in NYC have mounted eloquent and penetrating exhibitions, and the shows represented here are laden with the spirit of a protest, each one more singular and exciting than the next. Heavily hyped for her first outing at a new gallery is Dana Schutz’s “Piano in the Rain” at Friedrich Petzel Gallery. Schutz’s pictorial fictions are replete with her familiar brand of alterity, though in this sequence the figures seem more comprehensive than …

Seth Price is an artist with conceptual charm: he transforms even the most unassuming materials and practices into contemplative works of art with a Duchampian flick of the wrist. For his exhibition at Friedrich Petzel, “Non-Speech, Fire and Smoke,” Price continues to re-imagine what is deemed artistic media by presenting eight music videos installed in individual user-activated cubicles. That is, the artist’s music tracks (from two soon to be released records from Dais records and Audio Visual Arts) are complemented by video footage originating from his working archive. Although most of the music videos were assembled in 2010 and uploaded on Price’s YouTube channel last fall, much of the footage consists of runoffs of the artist’s more ambitious projects, such as his video lecture Redistribution (2007-ongoing), or material the artist has yet to incorporate in his oeuvre, such as a military film reel a friend bestowed to him in 2002. The resulting exhibition speaks largely to Price’s ability to create something magical from nothing, but also to the uncharacteristic peripheral, if scattered nature of its encompassing parts. The music videos included in “Non-Speech, Fire and Smoke” are very much the opposite of the hyperproduced Will Cotton and Katie Perry variety—and while …