At the Jewish Museum, Hank Willis Thomas Studies Repetition

THE DAILY PIC (#1337): In the blinking neon of “Caesar’s Visa” Hank Willis Thomas melds the slogans from Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and the Visa credit card. (Click on my image to watch a quick clip of the neon in situ.)

The piece is now on view at the Jewish Museum in New York, in the show called “Repetition and Difference”. Which brings me to my special interest in this piece, in that show: Thomas’s neon was made in an edition of three, and in this case all three examples are on view side-by-side at the Jewish Museum. We tend to see the repetitions involved in any editioned work as an ancillary fact not worth taking in, or even as something that should be politely concealed. Here, in a piece that’s all about the repetitions of branding, we get to watch a kind of art-world branding take hold.

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