How to Work Better: Making a mural on Houston Street – Guggenheim

As the critic John Kelsey notes in the Guggenheim retrospective’s catalogue, “Taken from a factory in Thailand and displayed in a supremely wealthy nation with one of the strictest immigration policies in Europe, the text becomes an ironic reflection on the way things go for commuter drones within a productively mobilized post-society, some of whom happen to be artists and curators: ‘SMILE.’” The mural’s audience in New York 25 years later is, if anything, even more subject to the piece’s ironies.