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Here's what happens if you take the money paragraph from Jerry Saltz's current review of Walid Raad's Kitchen show and present it in the format of Donald Judd's devastatingly terse 1960s reviews, which Chris Ashley has been quoting on his page. The equivocating phrase "--which is fine" at the end of the second sentence is snipped but this is otherwise verbatim from Saltz's generally fairly complimentary seven paragraphs on the artist.
Jerry SaltzJust fantasizing about the old days when reviewers said what they thought without burying it deep within the obligatory summary of the party line.
"In the Galleries"
Village Voice, February 2006
Walid Raad/The Atlas Group: As poignant as several of these pieces are, I'm not really sure Raad is an artist. He's more of a social scientist using art or examining power. He mixes Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, and David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology, but there's not a lot of alchemical energy to what he does. His work is smart, doctrinaire, and poetic, but formally it's very nth generation conceptualism. You wonder if all this fictionalized fact, factualized fiction, and secret-intrigue business is even necessary. Sometimes it feels wooden and hokey. His melodramatic Bas Jan Ader–like titles and his talk about "authority" and "authorship" suggest Raad is suave but has a latent pedantic streak. Also, nearly every work here dates from between 1996 and 2000 and has been seen in international exhibitions. He needs to do some new work. (The Kitchen, through March 11)