ABOVE: detail from Jasper Johns’s Bridge (1997), on show at the Matthew Marks Gallery through June 25.

The New Yorker’s new review of Jasper Johns’s current show at the Matthew Marks Gallery is a pleasure to read, as Peter Scheldahl’s writing often is. But it is also an airtight example of form trumping function: the whole review could pretty much be summed up with a shrugged “meh.” But this is The New Yorker, where a mediocre review is still expected to contain vocabulandmines like “demiurgic” (adj. 1. of or relating to a being responsible for the creation of the universe) and at least one word containing an umlaut.

But in the end, it’s not a review of the show so much as a meditation on the fact of Jasper Johns’s existence and an evaluation of his decades-long career. Nice to read, but doesn’t actually tell you much about the show. What we do know: it is called “Catenary” (”a curve formed by a wire, rope or chain hanging from two points that are on the same horizontal level”), it’s at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, and you can see three pieces from it here.

LINK: The New Yorker > The Art World > String Theory