Best of 2016: Judy Fiskin,
Three Funerals and Some Acts of Preservation
(Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles)

Narrating her latest — and hopefully not last — video, Fiskin relays Vasari's account of Michelangelo's two funerals, then provides instructions for her own more modest send-off (with ashes to be scattered in a West LA art-house multiplex). Meanwhile, we see meditative images of interns cleaning the Getty Center's outdoor sculpture collection — an awkwardly placed grab bag of modernist works donated in bulk in 2005 and derided by many on arrival. The video is a sharp, intimate reminder that while most art begs for preservation, its fate is as uncertain as our own.

—Michael Ned Holte