The art historian, critic, and curator Germano Celant passed away on April 29, 2020, in Milan. Perennially clad in black, his hair a mane of swept-back white, he was as distinctive a physical presence as his presence has been in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Described to us once as “a living Vasari”—a reference to the pioneering sixteenth-century author of Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects —Celant’s sustained output over the last six…

Duan Thi Huong’s body floats in the darkness of her image, equally glowing, and also dissolving, like smeared data. That auratic glow may simply be what happens when sophisticated technology colludes with its own technical limits. But it’s also the glow found in some of Gerhard Richter’s best-known paintings of women. The inferred illumination of technology’s soul. The substance Roland Barthes mourned in his elegy to his dead mother, Camera Lucida (1980). The impasto paste around Duan Thi Huong also invokes the charged zones encircling Willem de Kooning’s Women: vortices of matter, history, horror. Except in Huong’s case, the horror is emblazoned in the letters “L,” “O,” and “L.” This way, her image carries its own punch line, which seems so mordantly—or is it courageously?—at odds with cold-hearted killing.

1. Turn onto Besselstraße. You’ll see the Tower, grey and green. Look for the left-hand entrance. Pass the kids’ playground. Press buzzer name _______. I’ll let you in. Take the elevator to the tenth floor. 2. Look out for the single piece of graffiti in the elevator (always the word “SEX,” in capitals). 3. Just so you know, there is no other apartment on that floor. Just this one. The elevator doors will open and you’ll see me waiting for you. 4. After I’ve greeted…