Nice overview of the exhibition “public.exe: Public Execution” on the NYTimes.com today (unfortunately as of 5PM the exhibition is mistakenly referred to as “public.ex” … guess the reviewer doesn’t use Windows) in an article entitled “Politics That Makes Peace With the Beauty of Objects.”

Here’s the pertinent section:

Speaking of extremes, “public.ex: Public Execution” at Exit Art represents one of them, at least in terms of format. The show is all but invisible in the gallery, where another, long-running exhibition takes up most of the space.

In fact, “public.ex” has just two works on the premises. One, by Siebren Veersteeg, is a screen with a live feed of Associated Press news scrolling across a Coca-Cola logo to demonstrate the pervasiveness of American monoculture. The other, titled “What an Art Gallery Should Actually Look Like (Large Glass),” by the Turkish artist Serkan Ozkaya, is made up of thousands of slides of artworks submitted in response to an open call on the Internet. Deliberately abnegating curatorial control, Mr. Ozkaya displays all the submissions edge to edge, in random order, across several of Exit Art’s windows.

There’s also art in the form of handouts. The collective called Paper Rad contributes a funky cartoon newspaper with a cool, righteous election-year editorial. And Kelley Walker, one of the more promising young artists around, offers a CD of a poster he has designed. For $10 you can have the disk and as many copies of the poster as you care to print. So much for the sanctity of the art object.

The rest of the show is made up of Web sites (for the collective xurban.net, for example); screenings of videos (by the hacker activist collectives BEIGE and Radical Software Group); and live events. Will Kwan is organizing flash mobs to protest the city’s plans to build a stadium near Hell’s Kitchen. Brendan and Patrick FitzGerald, brothers, will lead walking tours of misused public and private urban space. Ricardo Miranda Zuniga will push a shopping cart equipped with radio broadcast hardware through the streets, inviting passers-by to program their own on-air shows.

All of this will be archived on Exit Art’s Web site, further dematerializing an exhibition composed of ephemera, gestures and pixels. And such a disembodied show is precisely what the curators — Anne Ellegood and Michele Thursz, with Defne Ayas — are after: one that as far as possible sidesteps the authority of the art institution, with its conventions of display and critical categories. Instead “public.ex” is dispersed into the everyday world, where art and life, silly and serious, seem to interact on the random, nonlinear model of the Internet, that most potent and exasperating of cultural resources.

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