Few major exhibitions in recent memory have generated anything like the sort of intensely polarized response that greeted the recently concluded 9th Berlin Biennale, curated by the New York-based DIS, an increasingly notorious group of Gen X and Y “creatives” with close ties to the fashion and advertising industries. A recent publicity email from the Biennale explicitly highlighted this split, inviting readers to peruse the show’s “accolades” alongside its “viral backlash.” Yet despite this blithely mediaphilic rhetoric of all-press-is-good-press, the statement barely concealed a more defiant, even petulant message, evident in its illustration—a smugly confrontational photograph of a man and a woman wearing Yngve Holen’s Hater Blockers contact lenses (2016)—and its advertisement for a “soundtrack” mix by Isa Genzken and Total Freedom called FUCK THEM ALL (2016). In presuming that any negative responses could be dismissed as mere hateration, the message positioned the Biennale as standing somehow beyond critique. This maneuver formed part of a more concerted defensive strategy in which the exhibition’s curators framed their product as immune to conventional forms of postmodern criticality, while simultaneously deploying their own bespoke, branded form of critical discourse, for example in a guest-edited issue of DIS magazine that attempted to theorize the “post-contemporary.” So …

For nearly five decades, Daniel Buren has used 8.7-centimeter stripes to highlight the lack of phenomenological neutrality of the exhibition space, his ubiquitous colored bands appearing everywhere from institutions such as Paris’s Grand Palais and the Centre Georges Pompidou to the hallowed escalators of Art Basel. Not soon forgotten is his participation and removal from the “Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition” (1971) at the behest of fellow artists Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Joseph Kosuth, and Richard Long, who felt their respective installations were aesthetically interrupted by Buren’s striped banner suspended from the institution’s famed rotunda. Buren’s “in situ” work, as well as the Guggenheim incident (which now occupies a chapter in many an art history textbook), taught us that viewing art in an institution is always negotiated by economic and ideological factors, and that aesthetic autonomy is merely a delusion. In an early example of institutional critique, Buren’s stripes point outward toward the institution, prompting us to reflect upon both the architecture and function of the museum itself. But what happens when institutional critique is taken out of the institution and located in a commercial gallery? Does it become an empty, decorative gesture? Buren’s first solo exhibition in New York since …