Word Salad

In the extended Trump era, an artist's truisms ring false.

- JERRY SALTZ

JENNY HOLZER: LIGHT LINE

THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM. THROUGH SEPTEMBER 29.

JENNY HOLZER'S WORK talks a lot but says very little. An OG post-conceptualist, Holzer, 73, follows a generation of talkative artists like Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Barry. Holzer makes her utterances sensual and haunting by materializing words into light. Her primary operating system is the LED readout in a sans-serif font, a formalist leap that is as much her signature as fluorescent light tubes are Dan Flavin's and boxes Donald Judd's. Her work at its best suggests the ghostly, disembodied voice of the collective subconscious, but her current takeover of the Guggenheim reads more like intellectual clickbait for the extended Trump era.