“Ai has cornered an artistic practice that, like the Sherman statue and the Washington Square Park arch, is monumental, both in scale and in function. But he is often pointing to the losers, not the victors, and making memorials to current, not past, events. In his TimesTalk Ai said that for “Good Fences” he is using the city as a “readymade,” putting an unexpected message in public spaces, but I’m not convinced of that classification. It’s true that he is using ordinary fencing as a medium, but the city is not the material, it is the exhibition space. His project did heighten my awareness of nearby, everyday resonances, but ultimately this work is classifying the city itself as a construct, while Duchamp aimed to classify art as one. I found it much more interesting when the work veered from the practices of both Duchamp and Ai, simply by being overlooked. Because they go unseen, these works are, like Duchamp’s dripping faucet, nonexistent, and they are profoundly unselfie-able. They are monuments unlike any Ai has ever made—more private, personal tokens of grief, like a stone placed on a grave or a memory in a diary.”