Marveling over the evolution of his latest exhibition, Charlemagne Palestine remarked: “This idea or obsession that I had with a few animals at the beginning, never did I imagine that it would become such a maximal, enormous work like this. It’s the biggest ever with about 18,000 or more. That we found them quite easily and quickly. And there are hundreds of thousands more out there so it’s like some kind of social phenomena [sic].” The animals are stuffed, and all of them used, or used up—orphans, as inscribed in the title. Together with a variety of props and sounds, they fill the cavernous main gallery at 356 Mission, which has played host to some of the most ambitious exhibitions in Los Angeles over the past five years and which last week announced that this show would be its last. Palestine’s précis provides the key markers for navigating his mesmerizing, heavily Instagrammed, carnivalesque installation: magnitude, the bounteous resource, the obsession “at the beginning,” and some kind of social phenomenon, though what kind exactly is the question for us. Together with orphans, two horns of plenty appear in the title, both in English and Latinate formulations, plentitude making a fine watchword for …

To cut to the chase: Seth Price banks on banality. Bides his time building constructs, rather than content; repeating forms overblown by rhetoric. Most famously, his oft-cited essay “Dispersion” (2002) has served as justification for the material choices made in his career, quoting—nay, preaching—redistribution of existing materials as alternative currency to the creation of new form as dictated by the demands of the art market. But, like items made of reclaimed wood at Crate & Barrel, so altruistic and self-aware in offering a way out from buying into all that “new” stuff being made, so too is Price’s art part careful marketing. What’s for sale seems to be the illusion of escape, or capitalism re-branded and snazzily packaged as an “alternate economy”—books readily available to download online, paintings pushing 200k. Quid pro quo. But in the context of post-1990s New York, as long as you’re self-aware and inclined to irony, double standards seem to be okay: after all, participation with the market is measured only in terms of how self-conscious of it you are, or how eloquently you can copywrite that relationship. Eloquence, at that, can assume many guises and at Los Angeles’s 356 S. Mission Rd. it appears as Price’s …