Review Roundup

Olafur Eliasson at MoMA and PS1

"...the Danish-Icelandic inventor and engineer of minimalist spectacle, is so much better than anyone else in today’s ranks of crowd-pleasing installational artists that there should be a nice, clean, special word other than 'art' for what he does, to set him apart. ... His character suggests both the mental discipline of a scientist and the emotional responsibility of a poet. If leadership in public-spirited art extravaganzas were a political office—and it sometimes feels as if it were—he’d have my vote." - Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"...like certain kinds of jazz, or ragas, or New Age ambient sound, this is an art of variation rather than destination. ...not-niceness is a crucial ingredient in Mr. Eliasson’s audience-pleasing art. It keeps it from being too sappy or flashy, all disco balls and special effects. ... And how radical is Mr. Eliasson’s art? How market-challenging or expectation-shifting? In the end — so far — not terribly. ...the work is too intent on appealing to our appetite for passive sensation and too readily adapted to corporate design. ... Enchanting the work certainly is, and spacious, evanescent and intellectually stimulating. In these ways it offers a model for a future art beyond the present rummage-sale glut. In others ways, though, it reminds us how far in the current decade art has not come." - Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"...monstrous fraud. ... So complete is his fakery, that he does not even supply the illusion of magic, but a kind of anti-magic which deceives the lemmings of the New York art world into denying their own senses and giving over big chunks of the city to his mediocre and mendacious tunnel vision. ... a torturer he is, with his engineering team and phony pretensions and the museofeebs and mayors and tastemakers who shut off their senses to champion his murder of esthetic sensibility. The camp of Eliasson is the camp of anti-concentration, an annihilation of all that is pleasurable, a complete nullification of art." - Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"The numerous large installations in the show foster, and repay, a contemplative approach. ... It is in the full sweep of the exhibition, in the accretion of sensory experience and generated ideas, that the power of this work is most thoroughly felt. ... an absorbing and very thoughtfully designed show. ... Mr. Eliasson's work seeks to do exactly what art has always done: make you see the world from an altered perspective, to see it anew." - Daniel Kunitz/NY Sun

"...beguiling and befuddling... this is one show that makes it hard to trust the senses, even while putting them on full alert." - Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg


Newseum (Washington, D.C.)

"Promoting the glory while burying the bad is perhaps inevitable in a museum that's funded in significant part by the very institutions it features. Which is, of course, not unusual. ... It's just that the PR tone clashes with journalism's ethos of objectivity and skepticism. " - Tony Dokoupil/Newsweek

"...the Newseum shows-and-tells at a time when media types should be doing more listening than lecturing ... It also costs $20 to get into the Newseum, which feels very strange in a city stuffed with fabulous free museums... Its placement on such an august stretch of D.C. real estate implicitly puts the news biz in league with the powers it's supposed to remain skeptical of..." - Jon Fine/BusinessWeek

"The Newseum's collage of forms is diffuse, perhaps inadvertently recognizing the tension in the news business. Its better instincts are visible up front, while its baser, and more profitable, love of scandal and celebrity are barely hinted at -- and buried deep inside." - James S. Russell/Bloomberg


El Greco to Velázquez at the MFA (Boston)

"...wonderful ... one of the show's plain lessons is that during Philip's reign, Spanish painters perfected the means of bringing recognizable human beings into their art. Spain may have been a center of Catholic piety, its eyes always fastened on heaven, but its paintings were full of vital, supple people made of real flesh and blood." - Richard Lacayo/Time Mag.


Amy Sillman at the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.)

"I say it's a gimmick. ... if all this has been done before, what exactly is the point?...why are they so bloodless?" - Michael O'Sullivan/Washington Post


© MURAKAMI at the Brooklyn Museum

"The garish dollops and swirls of contrasting color may recall the psychedelic tumescence of last year's 'Summer of Love' extravaganza, but unlike that era's belief in a new, youthful movement, this work views innocence through fatalistic (if saucer-shaped) eyes, exuding a compelling world-weariness not only for this realm but for those of sci-fi and fantasy as well... As with Warhol, the best stuff here is surprising, gorgeously executed, and darkly alluring." - R.C. Baker/Village Voice


Color Chart at the MoMA

"While the exhibition’s contemporary content might be disappointing, the curatorial expertise demonstrated for the 60s and 70s yields fantastic results." - Paddy Johnson/L Magazine


Exotic Rugs at the NY Historical Society

"...both an overview of the history of the Oriental-rug mystique in New York and a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Hajji Baba Club. This little-known Manhattan organization is, according to the society’s curators, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious group of rug connoisseurs." - Glenn Collins /NYTimes


The Medieval Hunt at the Morgan Library

"'Le Livre de la Chasse' was written for medieval aristocrats, but it will appeal to contemporary athletes, nature lovers and dog owners." - Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes