Today I saw one of the weirdest exhibitions of art that I’ve ever visited. The weirdness, I’m afraid, was unintentional and not ironic.
DoubleTake, selections from the art collection of Seattle’s weirdest billionaire, Paul Allen, is on at the Experience Music Project. It is apparently an entry-level art history show to demonstrate relationships between disparate groupings of art. Renoir paired with Lichtenstein, for example. Or Manet with Jasper Johns. Thought there are some very nice works in this tiny (28 paintings) exhibit, the concept is heavy handed and simplistic in execution.
The show comes across as formalist sensibility run amok. Here, see the vertical elements in this painting. Now, aren’t they just like the vertical elements in this other painting, done a hundred and fifty years later? As per the EMP mode, you trundle through the exhibit with an audioguide (I don't think you are permitted to enter without one), unfortunately narrated by the curator, Paul Hayes Tucker. He is over-the-top enthusiastic about the most obvious surface attributes of the work. History, context, or meaning are beside the point and rarely touched upon. The room was full of the muffled sound of dozens of copies of his voice from all the audioguides pasted to the heads of the visitors. Everyone, it seems, was busy having someone else’s experience of the work.
I had to aggressively ignore the clunky curatorial arrangement of the exhibit, and try to focus on being in the presence of some of these great works. There was a very nice Rothko in the show, but it was circumferenced by this modern, bright white frame that completely overwhelmed the subtle, spiritual sensibility that resides in the best of Rothko’s work. It was tragic how it ruined the piece. Much of the work in the exhibit was cruelly presented in these modern frames. Others, queerly, were left in their period 19th century gilt frames.
I left with a sensation I don’t think I’ve ever had from visiting a museum. I felt cheated.
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