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Last Thursday, as part of City Gallery’s Open Late programme, I chaired a discussion about dolls in art and life. The speakers were artists Yvonne Todd and Ronnie van Hout. We talked a bit about the ‘uncanny valley’, the idea that, as dolls become more and more realistic, they go from being cute to being creepy. I couldn’t resist illustrating the idea with this photo of One Direction posing with their waxworks at Madame Taussauds. Cute and creepy.

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Aaron Lister has curated a lovely satellite exhibition—Other People’s Photographs—to accompany the major Cindy Sherman show currently on display at City Gallery. This sidebar show presents the vernacular photos that Sherman has collected over the years, including a massive haul of snaps taken at Casa Susanna, the now-infamous crossdressers’ retreat in upstate New York. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, men went there to enjoy a vacation from their gender, to become one of the girls. They enacted stereotypical, normative views of femininity, aiming to pass as middle-class housewives, mostly. The snaps are an eye opener, offering an odd perspective on feminism. On the one hand, they anticipate a familiar feminist insight, highlighting femininity as a social construction, a masquerade (a Sherman idea). On the other hand, they complicate feminism, as the men discover their own freedom, release, and agency in the repertoire of characters and gestures, fashions and adornments, that feminists will soon reject. They pad the bras that feminists will burn. But do they retain their male privilege through the process? (City Gallery Wellington, until 19 March.)

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When I was young, we thought art was progressing. Everyone was vying to be on the cutting edge, and to define the trajectory of art history. Now art is understood as a network, and people seem more interested in the synchronic fabric of art, how everyone is intersecting—what node you or others are on this web. There seems less at stake; people seem less a part of a greater cause, and more concerned with their own ability to find a niche. On the other hand, artists seem to have much more freedom to carve out their own eccentric territory. There is much greater interest in the world, socially and politically. Art used to be much more about the self: private or archetypal. We used to worry about posterity. Now artists worry about relevance.
—Mernet Larsen, 2016.