Sherrie Levine, Red and Grey Check: 7–12, 2000

Narrator: These paintings are Red and Grey Check: 7–12. Carrie Springer.

Carrie Springer: There are all sorts of puns that one can find embedded in her titles and in her works, and these check paintings I think have that in the relationship to the word "check" and also in their reference to game boards and a sense of play.

Narrator: “Check” is of course also a term from chess—a game favored by Marcel Duchamp. There is a kind of an inevitable structure that gets built up in the history of art in which certain works, certain people attain a certain status and that comes and goes as time changes and the years change. Some remain and some shift and others move into their place.

An artist’s position at any given moment has little or nothing to do with the actual value of the work—art history is in constant flux.

Carrie Springer: I think in her work there's this amazing sense of playfulness that comes from making connections between things that one might not normally think of. And she opens that up, and the work allows us to see things in different context. And that is part of the shifting. It kind of goes against a kind of solidity of an institutional perspective in which there is an already established hierarchy. She allows this to kind of shift around, for the king to be threatened.