The newest SITE Santa Fe biennial, The Dissolve, hit the city’s art scene in a string of previews, parties and performances last week. But the show itself proves that all this fuss is about more than the production of fuss. It’s also about the production of an all-video exhibition that still feels human.

Remember the Being John Malkovich scene in which John Cusack’s character discovers the portal to the inside of Malkovich’s head? He’s at work in that 7th floor office, surrounded by floor-to-low-ceiling rows of filing cabinets filled with index cards. It’s his job to put the cards in order. Then, in one leap, he’s in the interior of another man’s brain.

Here’s a thought experiment for you: Start with a society that has a long creative tradition and take the “market” out of its art market. You could, for example, establish a Communist state and do away with all art galleries.

In his artist’s statement for Winterstate, David Nakabayashi says the inspiration for his new stock of paintings is a near-death experience: a wintry car accident that left him stranded on the side of the road in Ohio. These kinds of stories can represent truly life-altering moments that catalyze a personal re-evaluation.

The simultaneous photogrphy exhibitions at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art and Skotia Gallery oppose one another in nearly every way. In doing so, they trace the divergent paths contemporary photography has taken since the embrace of digital technology.

Vanishing Points marks the launch of LewAllen Projects with a curated group exhibition in the gallery’s Railyard location. The man behind the curtain is Alex Ross, an employee of LewAllen and a sometime art critic.

My relationship with Ansel Adams, to use the current parlance, is complicated. One cannot deny his technical mastery. He literally wrote the book—several, actually—on darkroom photography. So what is it about him that sort of gets on my nerves?

It took Christopher Benson 25 years to graduate from art school. After leaving in 1982, he returned to the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and completed the final year of his program to receive a BFA in painting.

Every town has a biographer, and painter Jerry West comes by the role of Santa Fe’s biographer naturally. Over dinner, the entirety of our conversation revolved around the history and geography of New Mexico. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of history and lineage.

I need to confess something: I don’t usually go for abstract painting. In the course of history, the rejection of illusionism (the attempt to make a painted object appear real) seems important but, at some point between Yves Klein and Robert Ryman, it feels like the ship bottomed out.  If I’m not careful, I end up in conversations about irreducibility and flatness, which are really just fancy ways to describe wallpaper.