Author: Ellis Stevenson

When you ask Matt Mullican where his new museum is, he hesitates. It’s a fair question, and he doesn’t have a tidy answer. The exhibition he’s been building in Liechtenstein, called THAT NOTHING SHOULD EXIST, is the largest of his career — hundreds of works spread across rooms that flood with light through enormous skylights. But none of it sits anywhere you could drive to. ‘The scale is massive,’ he says, ‘but in this instance, nothing does exist.’ The whole thing lives inside a virtual world called Roarington Art Center, and it’s set to open to the public in February.…

After a long day, there’s a moment when you’re scrolling through a food delivery app and the photos start to feel almost suspiciously good. The pad thai shimmers. No kitchen pass ever really creates the angle from which the noodles receive light. The cilantro is perfectly positioned in a green crown. Because that’s what the picture is for, you order it anyhow, and forty minutes later a container containing a dish that is both identical and slightly different arrives. Photography used to play a role in the space between those two things: the meal and the image. The question now…

A few years ago, I recall being in one on the outskirts of an industrial park and seeing a camera above a conveyor belt identify a tiny, hair-wide crack in a ceramic tile. The operator hardly raised his head. Regardless of whether the defect it detected was a flaw or, in another context, the very thing that could make an object valuable, the machine had already moved on, scanning the next tile and the next. It’s difficult to ignore that gap. The flaw was detected by the algorithm. It didn’t comprehend it in any significant way. As machine learning permeates…

The first thing the building tries to tell you when you walk into any large supermarket on a Tuesday afternoon is that everything inside was alive yesterday. A fine misting system that hisses on a timer makes the produce section shine. The lettuce appears to have been harvested at dawn. No real farmer would ever arrange the strawberries in this manner. As you pass those displays, you get the impression that the entire space is performing for you. Of course, most of it is untrue. The apples in the bin were most likely picked in the fall of last year…

Once you pass Lake Trasimeno on the autostrada heading south from Florence, the scenery starts to change. The towns sit higher, the hills narrow, and the billboards become fewer in number. Tuscany’s tour buses never stop passing through Umbria, which has always been its quieter sister. It turns out that the silence is intentional. Locals have been defending, debating, and sometimes fighting over it for decades. You’ll understand what I mean if you visit Perugia on a Wednesday afternoon. When they first opened, the escalators that ascend through the Rocca Paolina—the Renaissance stronghold now buried beneath the contemporary city—were a…

Somewhere in a museum, there is a jar of honey that has survived the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and this century. When it was uncovered a few millennia after being buried with a pharaoh, it resembled honey on a kitchen shelf in 2026. When I first read it, that particular detail stuck with me. Not because of the honey itself, but rather because it suggests that some of the most commonplace items in our pantries are actually the oldest records we possess. Stone and parchment are popular resources for historians, but they are not as durable…

A certain type of moment occurs in the produce section of a supermarket, usually around six o’clock in the evening, when the lights are bright, and the apples appear eerily alike. A shopper, such as a woman in her thirties carrying a basket, picks up an apple, turns it in her hand, and replaces it after noticing a tiny brown freckle close to the stem. She chooses another. And one more. She eventually locates the one who has no marks at all. She probably doesn’t realize that she just carried out the most significant ritual in contemporary food economics when…

Somewhere in a packing shed in Lincolnshire, there is a cauliflower in a crate that will never end up on a grocery store shelf. It has an off-white tint that caught the grader’s attention in a split second, a small bruise near the stem, and is marginally smaller than its neighbors. It ends up in the reject bin. Beside it was a carrot that resembled a pair of crossed legs; it was culturally invisible, technically edible, and nutritionally the same as the rest of the harvest. On every continent, this type of moment occurs millions of times every day. It…

The food isn’t the first thing you notice when you walk through the produce section of any big supermarket—the lights are a bit too bright, the misters hiss on cue. The geometry is the problem. Bell peppers arranged in neat rows of matching red, apples stacked like pool balls, and cucumbers so homogenous they nearly seem artificial. That’s due to more than just taste. Architecture is what it is. An asymmetrical pepper is a problem in the produce aisle, which is a display designed to perform abundance. In a sense, supermarkets are as much a part of the image industry…

Somewhere in central California, a bruised pear that no one wants is sitting on a loading dock. It only has a tiny brown freckle close to the stem. It tastes good. It was grown, picked, and packed by the farmer. After looking through a spec sheet, a buyer from a chain of supermarkets concluded it wasn’t attractive enough. It ends up in a composter, cattle feed, or occasionally the ground. You begin to grasp the peculiar, unsettling economics of what is eaten and what is not when you multiply that pear by a few billion. That was meant to be…