In “The Collected Ingredients of a Beijing Life,” (NYTimes, July 14) critic Holland Cotter reviews Song Dong’s exhibition, Waste Not, currently at MOMA. In only a few hundred words, Cotter manages to:
– introduce readers to conceptualism,
– familiarize readers with the artist’s ouvre, political context and spiritual influences,
– describe the work on display, its back story and the viewing experience.

Economical, clear, effective for general audiences and informative for specialists. Brilliant!

In addition to the quality of the writing, I also appreciated the description of extreme frugality, a tendency I’m quite familiar with.