Review Roundup

This week there continues to be disagreement over the Olafur Eliasson supershow. Leslie Camh at the Voice is mostly affirmative, exempting weakness for "dry formalism," while Joshua Mack at Time Out doesn't buy the ideas behind the art. Ariella Budick at Newsday is also disappointed. I'm not sure what Blake Gopnik at the Washington Post is saying. The Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn and others review the new "Superheroes" show at the Met, making it seem like something this blog won't like. Ken Johnson affirms my negative feelings towards the "Double Album" show at the New Museum. And Roberta Smith bemoans the state of biennials, writing that they "need to be laboratories, not annual reports." All this and more!...

Olafur Eliasson at the MoMA and P.S.1 (- June 30)

"By upsetting the ways we usually see and process visual data and by challenging categories like inside and out, stationary and moving, vertical and horizontal, Eliasson implies that information, even in museums—assumed by many to be neutral spaces—is highly inflected. ... Eliasson’s ideas, however, seem weightier than the works that convey them. Too often, his pieces come off as one-note optical games whose impact depend on mechanics and scale. ...there are only so many multiplying mirrors, kaleidoscopes and rooms bathed in various hues of light that one can see before a sense of déjà vu takes over." - Joshua Mack/TONY

"Land artists like Robert Smithson, Light and Space artists like Robert Irwin and James Turrell, Minimalists like Donald Judd, designers and social engineers like Buckminster Fuller: Eliasson riffed on their legacy with his own peculiar brand of anti-sublime enchantment—smoke and mirrors revealing themselves as such. This deft sleight of hand that turns dry exercises in phenomenology into wonder-inducing spectacles is also at work in 'Take Your Time'... For people unfamiliar with Eliasson's work, it will likely come as a revelation. For those who have followed his career, it may prove a more uneven experience—heavy on research at times, and light on communication. ... Do these and other works at MOMA rattle our fundamental notions about art or the individual's relationship to society? Probably not—but then, that's a tall order. The best of them skirt the dry formalism that is this artist's Achilles' heel and reach deeper into the realm of fascination and feeling." - Leslie Camhi/Village Voice

"Insubstantial is the word that comes to mind when describing the art of Olafur Eliasson, whose infatuation with light leads him to make things that glint, glow, sparkle and ripple. ... sensual, magical even, but little lies beyond its seductive surface. It is, finally, insubstantial in a deeper sense, a theater of smoke and mirrors that first provokes wonder and leaves an aftertaste of disappointment. ... Eliasson perpetually teeters on the precipice that separates spectacle for its own sake from serious meditations on the nature of perception." - Ariella Budick/Newsday

"Eliasson's pieces generate spectacular, crowd-pleasing sensations whose closest analogues aren't found in nature so much as in Hollywood. At its most impressive and popular, his is an art of special effects. Which means that it can feel deliberately deceptive; it seems divorced from reality, rather than out to explore and expose it. Despite a sense that the work sets out to worship nature, it is technology that seems most fetishized in it. ... In its weaker moments, the Eliasson retrospective feels like a trade show for the latest in consumer gear. ... The retrospective is better when its projects fail. When you first hear about that up-flowing waterfall, for instance, you expect something grand. Instead, it's just a crude scaffolding supporting a series of metal tanks, and jets of water shooting up from one to the next." - Blake Gopnik/Washington Post


Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy at the Met (- Sept. 1)

"... playful look at comic book costumes and their influence on radical haute couture as well as high-tech sportswear. ...the exhibition is a departure from the museum’s lavish historical surveys. This is the lighter, more fantastical side of fashion, an industry that loves to talk about the genius of Balenciaga while clamoring to dress the body of Beyoncé. ... as the writer Michael Chabon points out in a witty essay on the unitard in the 'Superheroes' catalog, this minimal garment, for all its flash and novel materials, ultimately 'takes its deepest meaning and serves its primary function in the depiction of the naked human form, unfettered, perfect and free.'" - Cathy Horyn/NYTimes

"Holy cultural zeitgeist, Batman! Comic books have invaded the Met." - Joseph V. Amodio/Newsday

"...the exhibit makes clear how designers have taken the superhero troupe and bent it to their own means, be it through explorations of identity, sexuality or nationalism. ... 'It's rather entertaining to consider superheroes in the context of this institution, which is filled with all of the great mythical superheroes of ancient times,' said de Montebello. Indeed, a short stroll from the exhibit are sculpted representations of the originals, such as Hercules who became Superman and the huntress Diana who became Wonder Woman." - Paul Lieberman/L.A. Times

"The show is very graphic and pop, if a bit thin on everyday chic. .. Overall, the vision is dark and edgy, with themes of fetishism, domination, virility, sexual identity and 'hegemonic masculinity' turning up like bad dreams..." - Woody Hochswender/Wall Street Journal


Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer at the New Museum (-July 6)

"...intermittently interesting but ultimately disappointing ... it introduces two artists in their 40s who not only share a fascination with male adolescence and classic rock but also seem mired in creative adolescence themselves. ...resemble promising but unfocused grad students who have yet to assimilate their influences fully." - Ken Johnson/NYTimes


55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh) (-Jan. 11, 2009)

"...the latest exercise in handsome, measured, frictionless thoughtfulness. It may actually have more than its share of interesting art and poetic juxtapositions. Yet almost nothing happens. ... I was dismayed to realize that I knew the work of all but three or four of the artists listed. Mr. Fogle has beaten some of the odds of so many usual suspects by selecting exceptional artworks and installing them with great sensitivity. Still, his failure to think outside the curatorial box is close to stunning. Worse yet, 16 of the 39, more than a third, are represented in New York by just three prominent Chelsea galleries: Gladstone, Tanya Bonakdar and Anton Kern. ... Biennials need to be laboratories, not annual reports. And the world is far too full of interesting artists for shows like this to be drawn from such a small and known gene pool. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it reduces the capacity for risk and dulls the imagination." - Roberta Smith/NYTimes


Discovering Rastafari! at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (-Nov. 8)

"...of course the Rastafari exhibition does not really belong in the same museum as paleontological finds and collections of insects and gems. That placement is a relic of the 19th-century conception of the natural history museum as a temple devoted to exotic 'natural' cultures and objects... As small as this exhibition is, there are enough history and material here to spur curiosity and wonder. But there is enough omitted so that eventually you see how partial — and partly skewed — an interpretation the show represents. ... pandering and promotion, not scholarship, and it mars what could have been an even more fascinating show." - Edward Rothstein/NYTimes


Frida Kahlo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (-May 18)

"She is giving the world the finger, whether in The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, where she does it with a masterful complexity, in some of her folk art– like self-portraits of the 1930s, where she can be raw or charming about it, or even in her less spirited self-portraits of the following decade, when illness was getting the better of her. It was an emotion, in any event, that she never quite lost, as it is there in the last words of her diary when she wrote, 'I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back.'" - Sanford Schwartz/New York Review of Books