As 2017 opens there is a sense that all bets are off—that it is time to roll the dice and keep a hand open to all possibilities. Perhaps this is all the more so in the Netherlands—in many ways the closest of the EU countries to Britain and perhaps facing its own democractic crisis with a fractious election ahead in mid-March. In a sense this is both the mood and the motive behind a new joint venture by six Amsterdam art galleries and their opening project, titled “Where do we go from here?” As far as gallery experiments go, the basic premise of trading in the art commodity remains unaffected. Nevertheless, within these limits something quite bold is taking place. This joint venture tries out a new, collectivized form of trading, possibly marking a turn towards locality within the art market and the cultural climate more broadly. The project takes the form of a synchronized exhibition, with works selected from the galleries’ represented artists and arranged by invited curator Alessandro Vincentelli (Curator of Exhibitions and Research, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead). Hot on the heels of the evermore successful Amsterdam Art Weekend in November, “Where do we go from here?” …

Black-and-white photo wallpaper depicting a gargantuan hand holding an iPhone with two text message bubbles visually dominates Ryan Gander’s show at Annet Gelink in Amsterdam. With the imperative title Be Prepared (2013) the stage is set for potential. I learn that the text displayed on the phone describes a probable artwork the artist thought of making while at a party. The first message reads like an absurdist title to an overtly simple sculpture, which looks like a person wearing a bed sheet over their head: “sheet thrown over her thinking about a young man writing a lecture about recent reinvention of car headlights and the cultural implications…” While the second message builds, like an exquisite corpse, on the visual details not of the artwork itself, but of the setting and (“importantly,” the artist tells us) of the viewer: “Black range rover aesthetic, blacked out mirrored window, black shiny spray paint, silver textual logo, A–Symmetrical, use unfathomable, someone looking at it is the most important aspect, young woman reclining nude with sheet thrown over her thinking about a young man writing a lecture about recent reinvention of car headlights and the cultural implications…” Forget about her “reclining nude,” forget about …

The title of Wilfredo Prieto’s solo show at Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam is as witty as it is tricky. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” takes its name from the well-known 19th-century tale by Hans Christian Andersen on vanity, cunning, and the willing suspension of disbelief, a tale about a narcissistic emperor who is more concerned about his looks than the welfare of his kingdom. One day he is visited by two travelling tailors who offer to make him a magical suit from the most beautiful fabric that is—and this is the crux of the fable—invisible to the stupid. He falls for it, and so do his ministers, the lot of them afraid of being labeled “stupid,” leading in the end to a naked emperor parading the streets. Prieto likes paradoxes: his show at MARCO, Spain, earlier this year, was based on a tale, penned by the 14th century scholastic French philosopher Jean Buridan, called “Buridan’s ass” about the donkey who perished because he couldn’t chose between a pail of water and the bundle of hay. But “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is far more complex. With hardly anything to see in the gallery, we wonder who we are framed to be: the …