Work—the title and the content—unpacks the meaning of one of the most saturated signifiers in 21st-century American English. Work, like other fundamental concepts such as property, is almost impossible to define despite—and perhaps because of—a common-sense feeling that we know what it is.

Text and image cannot be disentangled. We learn to read with picture books; we learn to look with captions.

In 1846 the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote a small pamphlet called The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion in which he described a social and intellectual landscape much like our own.

In the name of communication, we have accepted a radical enclosure of private, leisure time by the constant surveillance and increasingly commercial logic of the Internet.

You wouldn’t know it at first, but Kelly Jazvac is really into vinyl and death. The London, Ontario-based artist has been creating work from salvaged adhesive vinyl for nearly a decade, collecting scraps from often reluctant commercial printers and sorting them by color and size for later use.

Memory: Fragments of a Modern History begins with a provocative question: “I am more intimately acquainted with my own memories than anyone else can possibly be. Am I, then, the best authority on them?”

“I cannot take my eyes off that severed head,” writes Julia Kristeva in The Severed Head: Capital Visions. “Much as I want to, this is my symptom. Depression, obsession with death, admission of feminine and human distress, castrating drive? I accept all these human, too human hypotheses. I move on from them to imagine a capital moment in the history of the visible.”

Sherrie Levine: Mayhem is anything but chaotic. The work is meticulously ordered: four artistic billiard tables, each supporting three identically placed balls; six pristine crystal skulls enclosed in glass cases; 30 identical matted and framed postcards; two minimalist sculptures atop two pianos; one tidy row of black-and-white photographs of plants.

In 1966, Gerhard Richter affixed a pencil to an electric drill and produced one of the fifty mostly untitled works that comprise Lines which do not exist, a survey of the artist’s drawings from 1966 to 2005.

Andy Warhol predicted that in the future, museums will become shopping malls and shopping malls museums. The future has happened. The museum has been a place where one moves seamlessly between buying and viewing for long enough that the gift shop has come to define the experience.

“When you say it’s water, I get suspicious….”
-Roni Horn