In a Berlin Gallery, Art Critiques Itself

“We live in a society that is increasingly ‘Yelpish’ — if that can be used as an adjective,” says the artist Alexandre Singh. “My current hobby is to read the Yelp reviews of, well, anything.” (He mentions a recent deep-dive into the online assessments of N.Y.C.-area hospitals — the ratings are either one-star and joined by anecdotes like, “I waited for hours and was bleeding the whole time,” or five-star paeans that read, “We just had a baby! It was an amazing experience! The nurses were so wonderful!”) Yelp.com is the perfect case study of our “world of real extremes,” Singh continues. “We only care to comment on things that we feel strongly about, and our act of commenting, or judging or giving one to five stars prevents people from engaging with what they’re looking at.” Art included.

Of course, this isn’t some breakthrough in the analysis of human behavior; the process is just more immediate today thanks to social media and apps. It all certainly weighed on the mind of Molière, who, in response to his much-talked-about 1662 play “The School for Wives,” penned “The School for Wives Criticized” the following year — and it’s upon the latter that Singh’s “The School for Objects Criticized AE” is loosely based. The one-act play, set on the Bowery in the present day, was written in 2010 for a group show at the New Museum. Versions were later restaged at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo — and, starting tomorrow, at Sprüth Magers, Berlin. Though the recorded dialogue remains the same, the actual installation changes depending on the space; for Sprüth Magers, Berlin, Singh built a window that overlooks a three-dimensional rendering of Manhattan.

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