Lara Favaretto

★☆☆☆☆

On until 22 November 2026

It takes hutzpah to put a row of steel shelves in a fifteenth-century Venetian library, stack them with a bunch of decommissioned library books, and call the job complete. It is another thing altogether that more than half a dozen institutions over a dozen years have joined in Favaretto’s antiquarian act.

The art world art sees its preservation and reproduction in these “Momentary Monuments”. With literacy itself in ostensible crisis, Favareretto’s second-hand salesmanship exposes the museum’s anxiety that the image might soon go the way of the word. Imagine the Louvre a charity shop, then, with Rembrandt and Rothko in the bargain bin, Warhol the stock boy, and Duchamp in the toilet where he always belonged. 

Whose expense is this joke at? On redundant paper, Favaretto’s concerns are loftier yet more trite. The pamphlet speaks of “the book as an epistemic infrastructure” and “a critical space for verification and transmission”. Burning the art student’s undergraduate essays won’t solve the problem, alas. Neither will the conceptualist’s iconoclasm.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Adriano Costa, ax-d. us. t at Emalin ★★★☆☆

Adriano Costa

ax-d. us. t

★★★☆☆

Form triumphs over detritus.

Alia Farid, Elsewhere at Chisenhale ★★★☆☆

Alia Farid

Elsewhere

★★★☆☆

There is no answer in the work. Its cause and the object become enmeshed in a bland, exoticized mess. 

Official. Unofficial. Belarus in Venice ★★☆☆☆

Belarus Free Theatre

Official. Unofficial.

★★☆☆☆

Art matters neither to the dictator nor his opponents.

The Otolith Group, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another at greengrassi ★★☆☆☆

The Otolith Group

I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another

★★☆☆☆

The exhibition is a private memorial for Etel Adnan accessible only to members of the art world’s inner circle. And that’s a pity.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, It Will End In Tears at Barbican Curve ★★☆☆☆

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

It Will End In Tears

★★☆☆☆

With the right lighting, this story could be a mid-century colonial classic.

Shu Lea Cheang at Project Native Informant ★★☆☆☆

Shu Lea Cheang

Scifi New Queer Cinema, 1994-2023

★★☆☆☆

With material this gratuitously explicit and a curator this absent, it’s a miracle that this project wasn’t shut down by the licencing, or indeed art-historical authorities.

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