1. The Art World in 2006: A Snapshot

This blog was started in a different time — This was the era of the “Return to Painting.”

• The Turner Prize: Tomma Abts won in 2006. She was the first female painter to win, which sparked a massive debate about whether “traditional” painting was making a comeback against the conceptual heavyweights of the 90s.
  
• The Whitney Biennial: The 2006 theme was “Day for Night.” It was the year of Marilyn Minter’s hyper-realistic “glamour” paintings and Mark Bradford’s massive layered paper works.
  
• Banksy Goes Mainstream: This was the year of the Barely Legal show in Los Angeles (the one with the painted elephant).
  
• The “New” Digital Art: Marisa Olson coined the term “Post-Internet Art” in 2006. I began blogging about art just as the art world was starting to figure out how the internet would change making art.

2. The Digital Landscape: The “Web 2.0” Era

In 2006, the tools we were using were primitive by today’s standards, but they felt like magic at the time.

• The Platforms: I started on Tumblr, which was a thriving ecosystem that later self-destructed. Moved to likely started on WordPress (which Google had just bought) the later to a proper hosted site.
  
• The Consumption: People didn’t find you back then on an Instagram feed; they found you through RSS feeds. If you were a “power reader” of art blogs in 2006, you were likely using Bloglines or the brand-new Google Reader.
  
• The Community: Discovery happened via a “Blogroll” (that list of links in your sidebar) or Technorati, the search engine that tried to index every blog in the world.

February 2026

Twenty years ago today, I hit “Publish” for the first time. Didn’t realize I was creating what would be the longest running blog covering art exhibitions.

I didn’t do it to build a “brand” or to become an “influencer.” In fact, those words barely existed in the way we use them now. I did it because I was tired of forgetting what I’d seen. I was tired of walking out of a white-walled gallery in Chelsea or a dim basement in London and having the names of the artists and the visceral feeling of the work slip from my memory.

It took an architecture-adjacent exhibition, on Le Corbusier’s furniture designs, to make me stop and photograph what I saw so that I would have access to it later.

So this blog started as a digital notebook, a place to park my thoughts so I could find them later. I never expected it to become a twenty-year map of my life.

The Ghosts of Galleries Past

Looking back through the archives is a trip through a version of the art world that mostly exists in memory now. There are reviews here of galleries that folded during the 2008 crash, pop-ups in neighborhoods that have since been completely transformed, and “emerging” artists who are now household names (and a few who vanished entirely).

It turns out that when you keep a notebook for two decades, you accidentally become a historian.

The Evolution of the “Eye”

If you go all the way back to the early blog (I don’t encourage), it’s frankly a bit cringeworthy. My “eye” back then was different, my biases were different. But that’s the beauty of a 20-year trail. I can see exactly where I learned to appreciate what I appreciate, where I fell out of following certain trends, and how I found my own voice as a viewer (if that makes sense).

A note to my 2006 self: You didn’t properly cover that one show, but your enthusiasm was exactly where it needed to be. It got this rolling.

To Those Who Stumbled In

To anyone who has been reading since the early days of RSS feeds, or anyone who just found this notebook via a random search for an obscure exhibition: Thank you. This space is still just a notebook. It’s a place for me to remember. But knowing that there’s a community of fellow observers peering over my shoulder has made the process of looking more rewarding.

Here’s to twenty years of white walls, strange installations, and the endless pursuit of seeing something that changes the way we think.

What’s next?

I’m not stopping. The notebook is still open.

-Smokychimp

Here are the winners:

De Kooning at Gagosian.
Cecily Brown at Paula Cooper
Carl Andre at Paula Cooper
Cezanne at the Museum of Modern Art
Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian
Michelangelo at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Richard Serra at Gagosian
Bridget Riley at The Morgan Library
Jenny Saville at Gagosian
Kara Walker at the Domino Sugar Factory

Miles McInerney, New York, October 30 to Dec 20 2025

The Wolf Kahn exhibition reads like a clear, late chapter for an artist who made color carry far. Curated by M. Rachael Arauz, the show gathered oils and pastels with chromatic abandon. Acid greens press against smoky violets. Barns and tree belts hold the field. The result was a concise survey of how Kahn fused observation with Color Field thinking, replacing topography with sensation.

Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart in 1927 and immigrated to the United States in 1940. He studied with Hans Hofmann and moved fluidly between New York and a farm in West Brattleboro, Vermont. The blend of realist structure and luminous color became his signature across oil and pastel. Kahn died in 2020.

303 Gallery, New York, New York
January 16, 2025

At 303 Gallery (Jan 16, 2025), Esteban Jefferson turns everyday barricades into allegories. Hyper-detailed nodes (a rusted lock, a stickered sign) anchor the eye while the rest dissolves into washes and graphite, a push–pull between documentary clarity and withheld context.

Jefferson’s project sits at the crossroads of portraiture and institutional critique: he “portraits” objects that enforce space. By isolating these controls and muting their surroundings, he makes their power audible. The works read urban and specific—New York scaffolds, museum stanchions, bureaucratic typography—but they land as larger questions about property, memory, and the aesthetics of authority.

Background: Jefferson is a New York–based painter known for a selective realism.His breakout bodies of work examined how cultural institutions frame objects and people; since then, he’s extended that lens to the city itself. The result here is crisp and quietly accusatory: pictures that look like fences and behave like mirrors.

Harper’s Chelsea, New York, NY

January 9 to March 1 2025

Marc Dennis’s first solo with the gallery recasts Dutch Golden Age vanitas for the contemporary era: hyperreal still lifes where bees and iridescent bubbles orbit lush bouquets and glossed fruit. The works explore nature and tech (those glassy orbs read like man-made “ingenuity”), while round canvases such as A Simple Relationship turn the genre into little planets, studded with frogs, carnivorous plants, and celestial symbols. The paint handling is indulgent, as the palette goes full technicolor. But the mood is memento mori: beauty, briefly at its peak, already slipping. You don’t just see the shine, you feel the countdown

Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York, October 24 to 24 February 2024

Gallery openings are the ultimate “choose your own adventure” of social events.

There’s a specific kind of magic in that environment—it’s one of the few places where you can find a tech CEO, a starving student, and a professional socialite all standing in the same ten-foot radius, all pretending to understand the same strange object. The “you never know” factor works so well: Sometimes you walk away with a new best friend or a lead on a cool project; other times, you just walk away with a slight buzz and a very confusing brochure.

Then there is the occasional massive upgrade from “free wine and random networking.” Like you get to hang with a global icon of dissent and one of the most influential figures in contemporary culture.

In fairness, Ai Weiwei is known for being surprisingly accessible at his own openings, despite his “larger than life” reputation. He’s often seen wandering around, taking selfies with everyone (it’s basically part of his artistic practice at this point), and being incredibly observant. Anyway, he’s a cool cat.

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, New York
October 24 to December 14, 2024

At Paula Cooper’s 534 W 21st Street space, Cecily Brown staged a lush, headlong conversation with art history under the banner The 5 Senses. The show gathered new canvases and works on paper that riff on the 17th-century allegorical suite by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. Brown’s figures and fragments flickering in and out of legibility as if a sense organ failing, then flaring back to life. You read the paintings like a crowded room: perfume, music, flesh, fruit, and fur all press forward at once.

Brown didn’t treat “the five” as a checklist so much as a mood: sensation as excess, desire as a kind of weather. On paper, the motifs loosen, bouquets and bodies dissolving into reds and smoky grays, while the larger oils stack glances, touches, and tastes into a single field. The result is decadent but unsentimental, a reminder that pleasure and ruin are neighbors in her vocabulary.

Galerie Collection, Paris March 3 to March 16 2017

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York October 21, 2016–March 5, 2017

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Aug 1 to Nov 27, 2016

David Zwirner Gallery, New York, New York, May 1—July 24, 2015

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York June 27–Oct 19, 2014

Cheim & Read, May 15 to August 29 2014

Leila Heller Gallery, New York, May 6 – August 29, 2014