The 1980s was inaugurated with the 24-hour news cycle: CNN transmitted its first broadcast on January 1, 1980. Five years later, independent curator Anne Livet—in collaboration with Nature Morte gallery founders Alan Belcher and Peter Nagy—organized an exhibition called “Infotainment.” Traveling to several U.S. cities, it featured the work of East Village artists interested in media critique and Conceptual strategies. “Every Future Has a Price: 30 Years After Infotainment” at Elizabeth Dee features 40 artists from the “Infotainment” generation, including 18 from the original traveling exhibition. Opening in late October, the show was positioned as a timely response to the news barrage of the election cycle. In today’s post-truth hellscape, infotainment seems like a charming anachronism. With the election of Donald Trump, 1985 feels simultaneously far away and very near. The “Infotainment” artists, working under the administration of the U.S.’s first celebrity-turned-politician, Ronald Reagan, were united in their attention to authorship critiques and media theory. They eschewed the East Village tropes of Neoexpressionism and graffiti-inspired work, as well as a dogmatic approach to appropriation. But the biggest revelation in this show is the sheer variety of practices they employed, from painting and sculpture to video and printmaking. Still, photography is a cornerstone …

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 …