Review Roundup

The Brooklyn Museum - ©Murakami

"I don’t like Murakami’s work, but my dislike, being moody, feels out of scale with the artist’s terrific energy and ambition. For the second time in a couple of months—the first being at the Guggenheim retrospective of the meteoric Chinese festivalist Cai Guo-Qiang—New Yorkers have a chance to absorb our new geo-spiritual fate, as provincials in a world of creative paradigms that no longer entreat our favor. That has to be good for us. ... His aim, it seems, is to control and standardize aesthetic experience, forcing viewers into a, yes, infantile mold of rote response. ... Warhol, with his work’s beautiful color and catchy evidence of manual touch, is Rubens by comparison. But Warhol as marketer, not as artist, is Murakami’s lodestar. ... Unenthused visitors to the show may find themselves, as I did, refreshed in spirit by the simple elegance and honestly avaricious passion of the Vuitton boutique—helping the rich shed their burden of excess capital at a rate pitiably slower than what the art market enables, but in there pitching." - Peter Schjeldahl/The New Yorker

"That copyright symbol in the title isn't ironic. For 46- year-old Takashi Murakami, art is the straightest path to commerce. ... Murakami's art is not just perverse. It's alienating, regressive and as sharply critical as it is exploitative of Japan's surrender to American popular culture. Of course, that ability to be both moral compass and cultural capitalist is what makes Murakami so intriguing and annoying. For all its dazzling color and shiny surfaces, this show looks more fun than it is." - Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg

"The Vuitton shop is also one of the visual high points of this show, which has definite ups and downs. The bags, their shiny brass fittings and the impeccable white-enamel display cases achieve an intensity of artifice, tactility and visual buzz that Mr. Murakami’s higher art efforts don’t always muster. ... The ensemble fulfills almost too completely Mr. Murakami’s stated desire to make art 'that makes your mind go blank, that leaves you gaping.'" - Roberta Smith/NYTimes

"... an unflinching and unapologetic, nearly 20,000-square-foot celebration of the lowbrow horrors and banalities of commercialism, materialism, fashion, and pop culture. ... If you thought that the Brooklyn Museum (whose installations of its sublime Egyptian art collection have been dumbed down in recent years) couldn't sink any lower or become less serious-minded — think again. ...nothing more than a marketing machine for the dissemination and blatant merchandising of a brand, unashamedly and officially wipes art's slate at the Brooklyn Museum — formerly, mind you, the 'Brooklyn Museum of Art' — clean." - Lance Esplund/NY Sun

"...Brooklyn has one terrific site-specific moment, where Murakami created a series of large murals---skulls, flowers, abstract patterns, that confront each other in a sun-filled space. And on the fourth floor (which is the continuation of the fifth-floor installation), the compactness of the museum's separate rooms heightens the intensity of the most disturbingly profound works in the show." - Lee Rosenbaum/CultureGrrl


Whitney Biennial

" It's hard to know what to do with these scattered piles of things. There's no glue to keep them coherent, or to paste them into your memory." - Annie Wagner/The Stranger


Japan Society - The Genius of Japanese Lacquer: Masterworks by Shibata Zeshin

"Zeshin is now the subject of a marvelous exhibition at Japan Society. As a display of technical accomplishment and material beauty, it is breathtaking. Including stacking boxes, trays, tea services and sword scabbards, as well as paintings on fabric and paper, the show, 'The Genius of Japanese Lacquer: Masterworks by Shibata Zeshin,' presents an artist of exquisite taste and almost superhuman manual dexterity." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


American Folk Art Museum - Earl Cunningham's America

"'His landscapes are as sustainable as they are beautiful. ... Earl Cunningham’s America' at the Lincoln Square branch of the American Folk Art Museum presents 50 of Cunningham’s cheerful, intensely colored paintings." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes


Studio Museum in Harlem - Flow

"... a fine-textured survey of 20 artists who, with a few exceptions, were born in Africa after 1970 but who now live in Europe or the United States." - Holland Cotter/NYTimes


Philadelphia Museum of Art - Frida Kahlo

"I hope this exhibition will kindle new interest not only from her legions of fans, but also from art scholars and researchers, as there are still many holes and gaps that need to be identified and expanded in this amazing life." - Lenny Campello/Blogcritics Magazine