Reviews in Brief

Virtually any mid-sized sculpture would look good in the front gallery of KANSAS. Marked by large windows, warm wooden floors and a ramp leading down to the main gallery space, the sight lines and interior are designed to display artwork in a flattering light.

This isn’t so different from most galleries—artworks sell better when they are glorified—but it’s worth mentioning because the space re-enforces the warmth of KANSAS’s current group show. Cheat Chains and Telephones (through February 18th) demonstrates at every turn the power of both the handmade object and a good joke.

“Wow, they’re serious about the white cube here,” a friend whispered to me as we entered the Swiss Institute. He wasn’t kidding. The former Deitch Projects space is exactly square, totally white (shiny floors and all), and raised enough to make you feel like you’re walking on a stage.

This kind of presentation is a little much for the small work currently on display; it makes their show of Jean-Frédéric Schnyder’s landscape paintings Landschaft (Landscape) I-XXXV (through February 26) look like postage stamps in a space capsule. It’s no deal-breaker, though, thanks to the work.

Midway through Roberta Smith’s recent review of Damien Hirst’s Complete Spot Paintings, she asked: “Am I grading on a curve?” It’s a good question, and one that recognizes the difficulty of measuring art on a shifting scale: a good show at one gallery is a disappointment at another, and the best show in January might have been middling in the bustle of October.

Make no mistake: Rashid Johnson’s Rumble is one of the best shows in New York right now. It’s a tightly interwoven, confidently executed show that looks good, sounds smart, and plays to the preternatural ability to move between media that is Johnson’s greatest strength. At the same time, it has obvious flaws: it is unmoving, at times indecipherable, and falls into the Conceptualist trap of sounding better as a press release than it looks as a show.