The way a review’s argument takes shape is not dissimilar to the way an artwork’s premise comes about. Selected from the lot of pebbles-cum-premises, the rock is given some time in the tumbler, from which it emerges smooth, clear, yet with enough of an edge to feel distinctive.

The ignoramus is not simply one who does not as yet know what the schoolmaster knows. She is the one who does not know what she does not know or how to know it.

“Architect/arcetects/arcatects/arcetects/archetes,” Agnes Martin wrote at the bottom of her notes in 1974. The rest of the page is a tangle of equations and small diagrams with which the artist, having relocated from New York to New Mexico, began another burst of producing her iconic striped canvases.

The first element of Sophia Al-Maria’s installation at the Whitney exceeds the gallery itself: thudding bass not unlike the dramatic undertone of a horror movie bleeds through the walls.

The basket, also pink, is of a dull and dusty plastic. Somehow it manages to appear soft, as if it could melt into the floor or jiggle with a touch. In a dream, the potatoes might climb out of the basket, don that porcelain crown, and ooze onto the sidewalk.