Origin myths worth retelling: Art’s intrinsic value
2025 may be remembered as a tumultuous year in the world of the global art market, especially for Los Angeles. (In the art press, much has been made of the contraction of global auction volume in general, and the closure of once stalwart Los Angeles galleries in particular.)
It may be worth reminding art viewers of the oft-repeated legend regarding Donald Judd’s motives for starting the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. In its very instantiations, it was intended as a sanctuary for radical art, away from the inherent instability of metropolitan viewing contexts, protected from the machinations of art’s global market as an unacceptably extrinsic contributing determinant of art’s value. I used to work as an art guard at Chinati from 2021-2024, and this story was one of the most important foundational narratives of the visitor services script from my perspective.
I repeat this legend here, since I think it is fair to assume if Judd’s intention was indeed successful in the initial physical instantiation of its authorial intention, making the premise at face value, one might acknowledge it remains a strong facet of what it also means to look at art in Marfa today generally even, especially at this particular point in history when art markets are particularly in flux and networks of value are most lost in phases of reiterative homeostasis: market corrections. Especially at such times, this still quite boldly novel concept of sanctuary embodied by the Chinati Foundation, may be worth reflecting on as an overall reinforcement of intrinsic value. As one reflects on their own year past, on their own dear life and art continuum, why not consider also that just because some exhibitions on view may appear to the general viewer to make much too much inflationary fanfare about their status as serious art, it doesn’t mean it isn’t.
Here’s what I’ve been looking at recently.
Roscoe Mitchell in sound and vision
Paintings by Roscoe Mitchell at MAINTENANT are installed in two groupings, which face each other on custom walls assembled for his exhibition, which opened October 2025 and will remain on view into 2026 (end date to be determined).
When I visited this markedly cosmic ensemble his music was playing in tandem from the second exhibition space. The combination of sound and visual together offered an essential crash course in the world-making of Roscoe Mitchell, an elder statesman in the Chicago avant-garde jazz and art community.
Mitchell’s worlds are typified by a bright palette, which seemingly offers itself without judgment, artifice or self-aggrandizement. I concluded the same could be said both for the color logic of the paintings and the melodic order of his musical aesthetic. I listened closely, intent on confirming this hunch, as the two sensorial fields wafted alongside each other. To stop at a discussion of color would be unfair to the gentle and effortless structural sophistication at work, the nesting of spatial compartments rewards prolonged viewing and listening. Cartesian grid parts lilt and warble with irregularity as elements of his ensemble of animist portraiture. The matrices themselves groove toward an overall fluorescently electric study in divisionist links between sound and vision. Thursday and Sunday mornings MAINTENANT hosts boxing exercises for public use within the same physical space as artworks on display. This, amazingly, could further multiply the impression of kinesis across sensorial fields!
Richard Prince: A trick from a master gamesman?
New large-scale inkjet prints on canvas are magisterial in their magnitude. The exhibition opened May 2025 and closed December 7. Max Hetzler opened its outpost in Marfa in 2022. Its larger entity is a giant of the blue chip gallery network with outposts throughout Europe. It is hard to imagine Marfa as a location, fulfilling a role as a market outpost. The viewer is left to imagine an entirely different utility for this site has been intended. Since the physical exhibition site of Max Hetzler is arguably the only site in town able to physically accommodate works of such size, one might put one’s cynicism aside and imagine it all as a gift to the town, making it possible to see work of astronomical size and market valuation in one’s own backyard. Prince is known in art historically for his cerebral works of appropriation, most famously in the 1980s for a series that presented advertising images of the Marlboro man with daringly minimal creative modification of the source images. He has been as legendary for the litigation of alleged copyright infringement as for the works themselves ever since.
The exhibition title itself: Posters, might on first appearance seem to intentionally misdirect viewer expectation that Prince’s exhibit in Marfa would continue in that line of cerebral appropriation with intentionally minimal reinvention of the source material. This is not the case. While the source materials are indeed posters, their manipulation, sensualistic torn edges, and bit-mapped, moire-esque, color separation is exquisite in their painterly “opticality.” Swinging sixties nude models and countercultural political messages are amongst the plethora of poster content transmogrified into an entirely autonomous-feeling imaginal archive. Is this all a trick from a master gamesman, or a watering down of appropriation’s litigative and conceptually slick bravado, or a splendid iterative anomaly irrespective of either judgment: a true gift of art?
Christopher Wool’s See Stop Run
Over 70 works are on display in Marfa’s Brite Building from May 2025 through May 2027. Including a decade of work, the exhibition is a second iteration of an independent retrospective-like exhibition Christopher Wool organized in a vacant floor of a building in New York City’s financial district in 2024 (with the same exhibition title). This impulse to display his work separated from the bombast of market or museum contexts appears with all the clarity of a science experiment: remove factor x, and observe the internal structure of the works displayed without that additional inessential institutional layer.
The configuration of See Stop Run on display in Marfa follows the same impulse. Wool has lived in Marfa part-time since 2007. Now his neighbors have intimate access to a deeply generous selection of works, including wire sculptures, silk screens, a large-scale mosaic, paintings and photographs. Within painting discourse, there has probably been a dialectic between painterly expression and its contrivance since the beginning of time, but certainly since the well-documented art-historical, post-war New York period of painting, and in permutations across recent decades, Wool looms larger than life as one of its most significant re-inventors. While some might argue it is simplistic to limit the framing of Wool’s works to this dialectic, I propose that such a limited frame actually enables a pinpointing of the rich variety of Wool’s works. For instance, See Stop Run displays two bodies of photography by Wool, whose sensibilities of harsh black and white contrast invoke the existential joi de vivre of a student photographer discovering the dark room for the first time. However, closer inspection reveals evidence to the naked eye that perhaps that effect was produced in Photoshop through software-based processes and filters––a perfect encapsulation of the dialectic between expression and contrivance, helpfully demonstrated analogically outside the domain of painting, by one of its master dialecticians. On one wall, a linear sequence of 24 photographs appears to take sculptural inspiration from Marfa itself, the physical density of its old buildings and backyard junk piles. On the opposing wall is a double line of wire sculpture photos.