The effect is potentially interesting. You're walking around in a sea of squares that could evoke drywall architecture but are the wrong scale, are a little too small. You are constantly being drawn to look inside them, to see the giant palm tree, the girl with the seashell eyes, and so on. But these nice spatial moments are textbook, and the overall effect isn't intellectually rigorous — it's academic. The architectonic forms do not read as architecture or spaces so much as a Six Foot Cube with scorpion tails. The pockets of space do not work to carve out Craft's surrealist life-of-the-mind as much as they illustrate the idea that a sculpture exists in a space and has its own internal and external areas, which is, these days, almost dogmatically more important than the crafting of the thing itself. Basically, the show presents itself as a checklist of allegiances: not just Tony Smith, but Barbara Hepworth; Charles Ray; Rachel Harrison; Jennifer Pastor; Charles Long.

Liz Craft made an academically correct show that positions her tidily within a specific dialogue in contemporary sculpture. In the context of Chelsea, this is hardly shocking. We are at an academic apex in art history, the era of the MFA. We are all accustomed to artists framing themselves as good students with a clear sense of their relevancy to a larger dialogue. This impulse to be a good student creates a lot of art that is merely interesting or correct — art that's doing it right, and in this show, Craft is definitely doing it right.

On first glance, it is confounding that Liz Craft has succumbed to the conventions of this particular style. In my small circle, this show of right from the indisputable Queen of Wrong fueled speculation across a practical dimension — that perhaps Craft was spooked into making work that made more sense. And well, that's an easy answer, but I think that it's more interesting (and more fair to Craft) to look to the very nature of taking risks in the first place.

One of the reasons Craft's work tends to sing is because it pushes and pushes at exactly what happened at Boesky: it foists total safety on itself all the time. Bronze feels daring in Chelsea today, but really, it's safe — the safest. Your grandmother in Iowa knows what she is looking at when it's made of bronze. It's safe to take up skeletons or unicorns when others are doing so. It's not as safe as painting or anything, but it's safe for a sculptor to make objects that have inherent value and will last forever, and can therefore be easily commodified. It's safe to hide in your love of the making of the thing and trust that by loving the making of it everything will work out. It's safe to work with art school techniques and art history's lessons.

I have a feeling that Craft pushes herself into these “correct” positions and then busts out of them, or across them, by salaciously reveling in he making of the work itself, in making the smartest possible decisions within the stupidest possible framework. Within this system, the concept can be this supersafe amalgam of traditions and cliches, but in the making of the thing itself, each one of these traditions and cliches has to duke it out. The grand effect winds up not being dueling tropes at all. It winds up being about Craft's vision.

I know my take is just as speculative, but hey: at least it's across an artistic dimension. Craft is smart enough not to make such dry work, and has a history of serious risk-taking. So I look at this show and assume that her strategy includes busying her left brain with obstacles, doing anything that makes her say “oh my god this is going to suck” or “I can't do that, that's lame or too stupid!” so that her right brain is free to do its thing. And she seems, consistently, to get to these obstacles by clinging ferociously to in-jokes, tradition, and a formal training in sculpture.

This cold white body of work is, therefore, not really a departure. It's just that the Fun Button never got pressed. The actual making of the work never leapt over the obstacles of its conception. And so it remains a mere amalgam of ideas that never makes your heart leap, laugh out loud, or even wonder what is happening. The biggest drag, perhaps, is that in Chelsea, this body of work blends in so nicely. It looks so much like a world of work that refuses to risk anything in the first place. I want to tell you that when it comes to Liz Craft, I know better than that. Rather than conclude that Craft has done whatever we are calling "selling out" these days, I would rather see this show as evidence that the thing she's been catapulting herself over all these years is the safety of academicism and tradition itself.

Besides, truly talented artists like Craft learn from failure, so I am not heartbroken about this show. What I am doing is looking forward to what it will yield.