… Commissioned to coincide with Frieze, the hottest art fair at a particularly market-driven moment, The Art of Sleep features an insomniac narrator who ridicules the art world as “fancy-pants, smart-aleck, self-anointed so-and-sos” and compares art to “the business of religion: it’s pretty persuasion. It’s hocus-pocus. It’s a conspiracy.” Our narrator reaches this conclusion via a circuitous route, a literal shaggy dog story in the form of a bedside journal entry in which the sound of a barking dog at night leads down a rabbit hole of logical (and illogical) leaps: from the futility of the dog’s barking to the futility of everything, the futility of art, art as the most futile of things, art as futility itself, the “gold standard of futility”. At this point, the narrative shifts “from metaphor to materiality” and, in the process, comes unhinged. In our narrator’s words, it “leaves the bakery.” Art no longer resembles the dog, “it is the dog… art is everything. Not, art can be anything. A fart is art! I kid you not! It’s Marcel Duchamp all over again! It’s Air de Paris! See?” … (read more)