Natilee Harren

Richard Neer, Painting as a Way of Life: Philosophy and Practice in French Art, 1620–1660 (University of Chicago Press) Where do we go from here, when it feels as if truth itself is receding out of reach? Thanks to Richard Neer, I now see our collective condition in Nicolas Poussin’s 1658 depiction of the blinded giant Orion seeking the healing rays of the sun to restore his sight.

There was much to reward scrupulous viewers of Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s fussed-over paintings, with their hand-built frames, graceful orchestrations of unruly color, and judiciously applied bits of canvas, semiprecious stones, gold leaf, and sculpted wire. In Midnight Electrician, 2025, a tiny pebble of turquoise seemed to regard itself in some nearby shards of mirror, which have been carefully set into the work’s frame.

Please wash your face. Make a salad. Scream! Exit. These are some performance instructions and activities that counted as art within Fluxus, an international artist collective active in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan beginning in the 1960s. Fluxus artists presented everyday actions reframed as performance art and assembled found objects into game-like kits, which they sold at affordable prices. Fundamentally anti-elitist, Fluxus artists found value in the everyday.