The NEW MoMa.

I spent a few moments with the much appraised, uniformly sized, and evenly spaced paintings of Tomma Abts at the New Museum. These little painting with so much dimension are the stuff that critics and art posers with expensive eyeglasses that look cheap and plastic love to rave about. Painting as long been regarded as the highest form of high art, only because its thought to be the hardest. After all, you're trying to create a mirror to show the whole 3-d real world in a confined 2-d space. very noble indeed. Abts' painting are neat little things. I can't say I didn't enjoy looking at them for a few moments. They make me want to touch. Forms and patterns here look rather lickable indeed. Besides the visual novelty, I was really hoping to come away with something more than eye candy that can easily become corporate wall paper. These are some quiet and bashful, yet strong little acrylic and oils. Unlike the product of an undergraduate painting course with an emphasis on abstraction, these paintings doesn't feel as if they're just trying too hard. These are the wet dreams of a skinny boy in even skinner jeans in thick black plastic frames who likes to sit around and philosophize about the "meaning" of art, while carefully dropping obscure names of random artists. cute.

As I descend the stairs, I come to this:

Paul Chan's "The 7 Lights" exhibition is really a serendipitous encounter. I first encounter Paul Chan's in the last Whitney Biennial. It was one of the most memorable pieces of that show. It was a empty room with bare walls. It had only light projected onto the floor, and yet I felt as if I was instantly transformed to another place. His pieces are often videos of bright lights projected slanted at an angle on to the floor to emulate natural light through a window. The viewer is always someone indoors looking out through the shadows of this manufactured light onto an animated realm. The other world shown through Chan's lights is one of a lyrical apocalyptic doom. Things are falling apart everywhere, and everything is going to the shits - BUT with so much grace and elegance. Everything we know and love is falling silently, as the projections transform time. As I stood there for almost 15 mins, it felt as if half the day had passed before my eyes. The videos almost always have a segment in it where nothing much is happening, besides maybe the shift from one color to the next. The coolness of that didn't hit me until I wandered onto a strategic spot around the projection. My own shadow entered Chan's realm, and my shadow changed alongside Chan's, and I too,felt as if I am a part of this frightening new world that is might be to come.