The Everything craze, spawned by computers and a shrinking world, seems to have died down -- and that's a good thing.
Computers make it possible to capture every variation of some phenomenon. Inundated with massive amounts of information, we can only skim the surface. So presenting every instance of something -- a picture of the unedited surface -- becomes the lazy person's summary.
"Everything work" doesn't have to be digital. E.g.: gallery walls plastered with hundreds of items, basically "every drawing I did this summer," that substitute eye-glazing quantity for quality; projects that circle every occurrence of something in the NY Times; or corporate ads that sequence through every stereotypical type of person around the world, then have them join in song on a hilltop.
One of my least favorite types of art takes something from outside the world of modern art -- from traditional tribal art to digital processes -- and uses it to make things that look just like modern art.
You can make a good looking abstract picture from any source. From found material that "looks like a Rothko" to movies, calendar photos or mugshots reduced by software to pleasing abstract pictures, the effort sucks the life -- and authentic points of interest -- right out of its subject, by filtering patterns in a way that turns any phenomena into the same few pictures.
And to add insult to injury, the work relies on the assumption that some meaning is retained from the source. There's a field called "data visualization" that produces some awe inspiring images, but the whole point there is to present complex data (normally confined to rows and columns of numbers) in a form that can be digested visually, to give an intuitive sense of its meaning -- not to make a pretty picture.
To celebrate the end of the Everything craze, I present "Every New Yorker Cartoon (that I found on their website one day)." The laughs are in there somewhere:
Note I changed the title of this from "Every New Yorker Cartoon" -- it seemed like a cruel "bait and switch."