The Manhattan Art Review's Best & Worst Art Shows of 2025
(In no particular order)
Best:
- Marc Kokopeli - MY TV SHOW I 
TV - Reena Spaulings
- Flint Jamison - Class: Weight / Installation View - Miguel Abreu
- Robert Indiana - The Source, 1959-1969 - Kasmin
- Rosemarie Trockel - The Kiss, Material - Gladstone, Sprüth Magers
- Francis Picabia - Eternal Beginning - Hauser & Wirth
- Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko - The Realist Years - 125 Newbury
- Bill Hayden - Ding Dong - Gandt
- Hardy Hill - Landscaping for Privacy - 15 Orient
- Cady Noland - Gagosian
Worst:
- Laura Owens - Matthew Marks
- Carolyn Lazard - Two-way - Artists Space
- Joseph Kosuth - Future Memory - Sean Kelly
- Julien Nguyen - Matthew Marks
- Pierre Huyghe - In Imaginal - Marian Goodman
- Will Cotton - Between Instinct and Reason - Templon
- Christopher Kulendran Thomas - Peace Core - Gagosian
- Urs Fischer - Shucks & Aww - Salon 94
- Robert Longo - The Weight of Hope - Pace
- Sam McKinniss - Law and Order - Jeffrey Deitch
- Berlin Biennale - passing the fugitive on - KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Frustrating Mentions:
- Jeff Koons - Porcelain Series - Gagosian
- Richard Prince - Folk Songs - Gagosian
- Jana Euler - The center does not fold - Greene Naftali
- stanley brouwn - in a certain direction - Portal 5
- Caspar David Friedrich - The Soul of Nature - The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This always feels like a too-obvious exercise, but I guess these things need to be written down regardless. Maybe the only interesting thing in these selections, to me, is the complete lack of contemporary painting in the best and relative lack in the worst, if one is strict and doesn't count Hayden, Hill, and Longo, pictorial artists who don't work with paint, as painters. Even the Owens show wasn't really a "painting show" which leaves us with Cotton, McKinniss, and Nguyen, all of whom do slop painting, overtly so in the first two and ironically in Julien's case. In reviewing my reviews there were fewer exceptional shows than I remembered (but a lot of good ones), which might be because I gave an outsized amount of thought to a handful of exhibitions this year and glazed over the rest. The "Frustrating Mentions" are a reflection of that; they're shows that provoked or challenged me in ways that stuck in my mind without earning my unreserved endorsement. Koons and Prince are just as impossible to deny as they are to accept, Brouwn drew me into an existential dilemma about the nature of conceptual art's place in history that I'm still working through, and Friedrich represents everything that repulses me about the Enlightenment, which is easy enough to avoid or shrug off for my own purposes but much harder to confront as an alternate worldview that can't simply be dismissed as "bad." Euler was just notably frustrating, an exceptional disappointment to the point that it retrospectively destabilizes what I thought I liked about her work, but she's nowhere near the levels of totalizing cynicism and abject stupidity of the worst shows. The honorable mentions would be a long list: Susan Rothenberg, Allen Berke & Lise Soskolne, Calder at the Whitney, Trisha Donnelly, Diebenkorn, Lucy Skaer, Renoir, Jay DeFeo, Jeremy Glogan, Dieter Roth, etc., but you can also ctrl+F "****" on the main page and get the same picture.
I'm not sure what, if anything, this collection of shows "says about art today," but if I look at the bottom and top contemporary artists it feels clear that the bad ones are all directly indicative of social trends while the top ones are singular. That singularity is more perilous than individualistic, in the manner of what Sainte-Beuve described as "Baudelaire's folly", in the sense that it seems good art only gets made today as an impossible feat in spite of every imaginable social pressure. This isn't an encouraging state of affairs, but it's not the first time and it surely won't be the last. I can't help but think that Baudelaire would have been a footnote in history if his family hadn't ruined his entire life by withholding his inheritance without paying off his debts first, and likewise the struggles, suffering, isolation, and misfortune (whether socially or self-inflicted) of any number of greats is inextricable from their work: Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Kafka, Dickinson, Milton, Hölderlin, Pollock, Lozano, Manet, Goya, Cézanne, even Bach, of course Van Gogh and Beethoven, maybe even close to the lion's share of great artists. There are a few undeniably smooth success stories like Velázquez and Johns, but they're surely the exceptions to the rule. Broadly speaking, the scope of art's possibility is glimpsed more in the work of artists who have overcome (or succumbed to) adversity than in those who have been left to work comfortably in peace. The long-discussed crisis of art seems actually to be the fault of art having become too easy, the sphere of mediocrity rewarded growing so large that the lunatic fringe that carried us through modernity has been all but swallowed up by it. Thus the issue is less to harness that crisis or find some kind of novelty in it but to find the ground for a verve in art that doesn't capitulate to money or attention or anything that would tempt art to compromise itself. This isn't art for art's sake but art for life's sake, the resolute belief that life without art is irredeemably dull or not worth living, or rather, that art traffics in the realms of experience that make life worth living. We come to know life beyond ourselves through art, as we once did through religion, rituals, and traditions, and to neglect that development is to be destitute in our interior lives, which is an emptiness that nothing else can compensate for. This is to say that art is a function of culture, and life without culture descends into solipsism, greed, and stupidity, which is to say that art is based in the elusive possibility of intersubjectivity. The paradox of modernity is the attempt to reconcile the contradictory desires to both belong to a social collective and to not be oppressed by that belonging; successful art succeeds precisely by that reconciliation, by the creation of something that resonates with others by means of its particularity, a realized specificity recognized within the social field of art. Art is no coherent vision of how to structure society, of course, but the process itself is a means of human cultivation that cannot be dispensed with. Art's crisis is its loss of this sense for development, which has led to an aimless self-satisfaction that takes its own moneyed decadence for its justification. It's easier to settle for the path of least resistance, as always, but I could never be so pessimistic to think that the desire for something more in art could ever die completely, at least not while the history of art still exists as an example of what it is capable of.
"Art, χωρίς from the empirically existing, takes up a position to it in accord with Hegel's argument against Kant: The moment a limit is posited, it is overstepped and that against which the limit was established is absorbed. Only this, not moralizing, is the critique of the principle of l'art pour l'art, which by abstract negation posits the χωρισμός of art as absolute." - Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 6.