I was invited to see Mary Little’s new work at the iconic Frank Gehry Binoculars Building in Venice, California (the binoculars were designed by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen). I remember standing in a conference room Gehry created in the space. It was modeled with wood, like the skeleton of the inside belly of a whale.

It’s not exclusively electronic, nor is it necessarily literary, but it’s all exhibited under the banner of electronic literature.

New York-based artist Aaron Johnson creates raw story-like tableaus, paintings that feature humans and creatures stuck in extreme narratives, and more recently canvases and standalone sculptures built-up with layers of painted socks. His highly-detailed, fantastical aesthetic with jarring colors consistently pushes the limits of decorum.

Most art fairs focus on what’s new: contemporary artists showing their latest (and most saleable) work. In a field over-saturated with newness, older works have a renewed capacity to shock and surprise.

Christopher Stout is an artist I met years ago during a studio visit in New York City. I was looking at his work in his West Village studio and realized he was a different kind of artist than many I knew. Stout’s Bushwick Art Crit Group got a lot of attention in New York while he continued making, selling and promoting his paintings—Stout was everywhere.

In a junk mail-filled world of fast fashion and here-today-gone-tomorrow memes and tweets it’s re-assuring to get reminders that not everything has gone to hell in a hand basket.